Indexing and retrieval of on-line handwritten documents

Recent advances in on-line data capturing technologies and its widespread deployment in devices like PDAs and notebook PCs is creating large amounts of handwritten data that need to be archived and retrieved efficiently. Word-spotting, which is based on a direct comparison of a handwritten keyword to words in the document, is commonly used for indexing and retrieval. We propose a string matching-based method for word-spotting in on-line documents. The retrieval algorithm achieves a precision of 92.3% at a recall rate of 90% on a database of 6, 672 words written by 10 different writers. Indexing experiments show an accuracy of 87.5% using a database of 3,872 on-line words.