Designing a handwriting reader

Computer recognition of cursive handwriting is complisated by the lack of letter separation. In an attempt to gain insight on the cursive problem, the simpler problem of recognizing separated hand-written letters is addressed here. A warp-based character matching technique is employed with dictionary lookup, using a 16 000 word vocabulary. Cooperative users achieve high recognition accuracy with this on-line system, which is easily tailored to the individual. Possible extensions to cursive writing are discussed.