Verification of dynamic curves extracted from static handwritten scripts

Static handwritten scripts originate as images on documents and do not, by definition, contain any dynamic information. To improve the accuracy of static handwriting recognition systems, many techniques aim to estimate dynamic information from the static scripts. Mostly, the pen trajectories of the scripts are estimated. However, the efficacy of the resulting pen trajectories are rarely evaluated quantitatively. This paper proposes a protocol for the objective evaluation of automatically determined pen trajectories. A hidden Markov model is derived from a ground-truth trajectory. An estimated trajectory is then matched to the derived model. Statistics describing substitution, insertion and deletion errors are then computed from this match. The proposed algorithm is especially useful for performance comparisons between different pen trajectory estimation algorithms. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.