A performance comparison of two handwriting recognizers

An experiment is described comparing two commercial handwriting recognizers with discrete hand-printed characters. Each recognizer was tested at two levels of constraint, one using lowercase letters (which were the only symbols included in the input text) and the other using both uppercase and lowercase letters. Two factors-recognizer and constraint-with two levels each, resulted in four test conditions, A total of 32 subjects performed text-entry tasks for each condition. Recognition accuracy differed significantly among conditions. Furthermore, the accuracy observed (87%-93%) was below the walk-up accuracy claimed by the developers of the recognizers. Entry speed was affected not only by recognition conditions but by users' adaptation to the idiosyncrasies of the recognizers. In an extensive error analysis, numerous weaknesses of the recognizers are revealed, in that certain characters are error prone and are misrecognized in a predictable way. This analysis, and the procedure for such, is a useful tool for designers of handwriting-recognition systems. User satisfaction results showed that recognition accuracy greatly affects the impression of walk-up users. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.