Fast spatial segmenter for handwritten characters

Abstract

A character recognition system 10 includes a segmentation processor 12 which is coupled between an electronic tablet 14 and a character recognizer 18. The tablet 14 has an associated stylus or pen 15 with which a user forms symbols, such as block printing or script characters, on a surface of the tablet 14. The tablet 14 has x-axis and y-axis output signals expressive of the position of the pen 15 within an x-y tablet coordinate system. A stroke capture device 16 intercepts the x-y outputs from the tablet to generate x-y position pair data for the segmentation processor 12. An output of the segmentation processor 12 is data expressive of connected strokes and unconnected strokes which is input to the character recognizer 18. The segmentation method and apparatus segments real-time handwriting outputs from the electronic tablet by a recursive method which rapidly locates a general area in which two strokes might intersect by successively finding intersections of maximal areas or boxes associated with the strokes until an exit condition is determined.