Reading Cursive Handwriting

We present a method for off-line reading of cursive handwriting, which derives from modelling handwriting as a complex movement. The method includes a step for recovering the writing order from static images of handwriting, a segmentation algorithm that decomposes the “unfolded” ink into strokes, an ink matching step to compare the ink of the unknown handwriting with those of a set of reference words, of whom the transcripts are given, and a graph search algorithm to search for the best interpretation among the possible ones. The method does not involve any feature extraction, nor a classification stage and may benefit from a linguistic context, if available. We report the results of experiments on 8,000 samples, draw some conclusions and outline further developments.