Online computation of similarity between handwritten characters

We are interested in the problem of curve identification, motivated by problems in handwriting recognition. Various geometric approaches have been proposed, with one of the most popular being "elastic matching." We examine the problem using distances defined by inner products on functional spaces. In particular we examine the Legendre and Legendre-Sobolev inner products. We show that both of these can be computed in online constant time. We compare both with elastic matching and conclude that the Legendre-Sobolev distance measure provides a competitive alternative to elastic matching, being almost as accurate and much faster.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: DRR
• Authors: Oleg Golubitsky, Stephen M. Watt
• Keywords: Document Analysis, DRR 2009, Elastic Matching, Inner Products, Various Geometric Approaches