Handwriting Recognition

[gregpinero at gmail.com]

On Aug 20, 9:00 am, "Ian Dickinson" <I_Dickin... at bitwise.co.uk> wrote:
> However a friend of mine who is a special educational needs teacher was asking me if I could write some handwriting recognition software for her, which would allow here pupils to write their input directly on a graphics tablet and then have this input converted to a text sting for further processing. The handwriting would be distinct letters either upper or lower case but not joined up writing.  I would like to help out here as I think this is a valuable  and worthwhile area of education so has anyone out there got any advice that could help me out.

Sure you just use the handwriting recognition library:

import handwriting
...

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-handwriting.html

ha ha, I kid, I kid.

I don't think this is an easy problem to solve.  You'd probably want
Python to be a wrapper around whatever hand-writing recognition
software you find or buy.  I know handwriting recognition software can
read the hand-writing on checks, so that may be a starting point.

Alternatively, Tesseract is an up and coming open source OCR engine.
Perhaps you could build on that to do limited handwriting recognition:
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

And here's a wikipedia entry on the subject to familiarize yourself
with it a bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handwriting_recognition

Finally, perhaps you could buy a graphics tablet that already offers
handwriting recognition and go from there.

-Greg