ISIgraphy: A tool for online handwriting sample database generation

Abstract

Online handwriting recognition research has recently received significant thrust. Specifically for Indian scripts, handwriting recognition has not been focused much till in the near past. However, due to generous Government funding through the group on Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) of the Ministry of Communication & Information Technology (MC&IT), Govt. of India, research in this area has received due attention and several groups are now engaged in research and development works for online handwriting recognition in different Indian scripts. An extensive bottleneck of the desired progress in this area is the difficulty of collection of large sample databases of online handwriting in various scripts. Towards the same, recently a user-friendly tool on Android platform has been developed to collect data on handheld devices. This tool is called ISIgraphy and has been uploaded in the Google Play for free download. This application is designed well enough to store handwritten data samples in large scales in user-given file names for distinct users. Its use is script independent, meaning that it can collect and store handwriting samples written in any language, not necessarily an Indian script. It has an additional module for retrieval and display of stored data. Moreover, it can directly send the collected data to others via electronic mail.