Recovery of Drawing Order from Single-Stroke Handwriting Images

ÐThis paper describes a new method to recover a drawing order of a handwritten script from a static 2D image. The script should be written in a single stroke and may include double-traced lines. After the script is scanned in and preprocessed, we apply our recovery method which consists of two phases. In the first phase, we globally analyze the graph constructed from the skeletal image and label the graph by determining the types of each edge. In the second phase, we trace the graph from the start vertex to the end vertex using the labeling information. This method does not enumerate the possible cases, for example, by solving the traveling salesman problem and, therefore, does not cause a combinatorial explosion even if the script is very complex. By recovering a drawing order of a handwritten script, the temporal information can be recovered from a static 2D image. Hence, this method will be used as a bridge from the offline handwriting character recognition problem to the online one. Index TermsÐHandwriting, cursive script, character recognition, stroke recovery, temporal information, image processing, OCR.