Pen pressure features for writer-independent on-line handwriting recognition based on substroke HMM

This paper discusses the use of pen pressure as a feature in writer-independent on-line handwriting recognition. We propose two kinds of features related to pen pressure: one is the pressure representing pen ups and downs in a continuous manner; the other is the time-derivative of the pressure representing the temporal pattern of the pen pressure. Combining either of them with the existing feature (velocity vector), a 3-dimensional feature is composed for character recognition. Some techniques of interpolating the pen pressure during the pen-up interval is also proposed for a pre-processing purpose. Through experimental evaluation using 1,016 elementary Kanji characters compared with the baseline performance using velocity vector only, the additional use of pen pressure improved the performance from 97.5% to 98.1% for careful writings and from 91.1% to 93.1% for cursive writings.