Patent ID: 7630551

Claim:
A method of line extraction in a digital ink sequence, said digital ink sequence being generated by an input device used to write handwritten text, the method including the steps of: receiving, in a processor communicating with the input device, a stroke sequence comprised of a sequence of strokes; segmenting the strokes into a sequence of substrokes by applying a stroke segmentation algorithm; calculating a centroid for each substroke; using each centroid to calculate angular differences between neighbouring groups of substrokes, in the sequence of substrokes; and, determining the positions of the extrema of the angular differences, said extrema corresponding to substrokes at line breaks, thereby enabling line extraction in the stroke sequence, wherein substrokes are grouped about a selected substroke into a temporally preceding group of substrokes and a temporally subsequent group of substrokes, the centroid of the temporally preceding group and the temporally subsequent group being used to calculate the angular difference at the selected substroke.