Method and apparatus for similarity matching of handwritten data objects

Abstract

Apparatus for determining a distance between two handwritten strings in a database. A processor extracts global features from each string. The processor divides the string into strokes, and identifies a plurality of bounding boxes. Each box contains a different stroke. The processor extracts global features from the suing, including: (1) a number of points; (2) a maximum angle between a first point in the string and a corner of the tallest bounding box; (3) a number of positive inversions; and (4) a number of negative inversions. The apparatus calculates the distance between the strings based on all of the numbers of points, maximum angles, numbers of positive inversions and numbers of negative inversions. A fixed query tree index may be formed. The tree has leaves and internal nodes belonging to multiple levels. A different key is associated with each level. Each key is a handwritten string. Each string is associated with one of the leaves, such that each child of each internal node in any of the levels between the one leaf and the root node is a root of a respective subtree. Each string associated with any leaf in the subtree which includes the one leaf is equally distant from the key associated with the one level, based on the global features. The tree is queried to search for a subset of the strings, such that each string in the subset is within a threshold distance of an input string, according to the distance function.