Prof. Angelo Marcelli will present a principled approach to automatic cursive handwriting reading. The approach is based upon handwriting generation models, and according to them assumes that handwriting is a learned complex motoric task which is accomplished by sequencing simpler movement called stroke.

Automatic reading of cursive handwriting

As learning proceeds in human, so does fluency, which results in producing similar sequence of strokes in correspondence of sequence of letters. Such invariants represents therefore the basic drawing units to which an interpretation can be associated. Reading is then achieved by detecting the invariants used to produce the word to be recognized, associating to them their interpretations, and eventually concatenating the interpretations along the ink of the word, without explicit segmentation in characters, as in case of analytical approaches, or using dictionary of possible words, as in case of holistic methods.

He will conclude with a list of key issues to be addressed while pursuing the proposed approach and the steps we have undertaken along this path.