Patent ID: 7042809

Claim:
A method for recognising characters traced manually on an input zone of an electronic device by means of a finger or a tracing instrument, said input zone comprising a plurality of sensors each capable of being activated by means of said finger or said tracing instrument, said method comprising the step of comparing the manual trace of a character performed on said input zone with a group of characters from a predetermined set of characters, wherein each character of said set of characters is represented by at least one reference model representative of a way in which the character in question can be traced, and wherein a trace model representative of the way in which said manual trace of the character has been performed on said input zone is elaborated, the reference models comprising at least the following topological parameters concerning the topology of the character, namely: (i) the number of strokes used to trace the character; (ii) the nature of each stroke, namely whether it is formed of a dot or one or more segments; and (iii) the composition of each stroke formed of one or more segments, namely: the number of segments forming said stroke; and the nature of each segment, namely whether it is a segment of rectilinear or curved nature, the models further comprising, if previous steps (i) to (iii) are not sufficient to recognize the manually traced character: (iv) for each segment of rectilinear or curved nature, geometric parameters representative of the evolution of angular orientation of the trace of the segment; and/or (v) for each stroke, geometric parameters representative of the position of the stroke, said method further comprising the steps of: determining a group of candidates, from among the reference models of the characters of said set of reference characters, which have topological parameters similar to the trace model of said manual trace of the character; then if the group of candidates includes more than one candidate, identifying the candidate that has the geometric parameters of evolution of angular orientation and/or of position closest to the trace model of said manual trace of the character.