Recognition of handwritten mathematical expressions

In recent years, the recognition of handwritten mathematical expressions has received an increasing amount of attention in pattern recognition research. The diversity of approaches to the problem and the lack of a commercially viable system, however, indicate that there is still much research to be done in this area. In this thesis, I will describe an on-line approach for converting a handwritten mathematical expression into an equivalent expression in a typesetting command language such as TEX or MathML, as well as a feedback-oriented user interface which can make errors more tolerable to the end user since they can be quickly corrected. The three primary components of this system are a method for classifying isolated handwritten symbols, an algorithm for partitioning an expression into symbols, and an algorithm for converting a two-dimensional arrangements of symbols into a typeset expression. For symbol classification, a Gaussian classifier is used to rank order the interpretations of a set of strokes as a single symbol. To partition an expression, the values generated by the symbol classifier are used to perform a constrained search of possible partitions for the one with the minimum summed cost. Finally, the expression is parsed using a simple geometric grammar.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1999

Author dc:creator

• Matsakis, Nicholas E. (Nicholas Elias), 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Paul A. Viola.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16727

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16727