Patent ID: 7174043

Claim:
A method for recognizing an input handwritten character digitized as a sequence of coordinate points in two dimensional space representative of a trajectory making up an input character, the method comprising: gathering the sequence of points for the input character; building an input graph with nodes representative of significant points along the trajectory of the input character and with edges between nodes representative of the trajectory formed by the sequence of points of the input character between the significant points; describing each edge in the input graph based on the shape and orientation of the trajectory that the edge represents, wherein describing each edge includes determining, for each described edge of the input graph, a character-part shape from one or more codebooks that is closest to a portion of the trajectory represented by that edge; describing individual edges in one or more model graphs based on a similarity of a given edge in the model graph to multiple shapes in the one or more codebooks; evaluating the input graph against the one or more model graphs, using the described edges of the input graph and the model graph, for all possible characters to find a model graph having the most similar path to a path of the input graph and identifying the input character as an answer character represented by the model graph with the most similar path.