Patent ID: 6973215

Claim:
A method of recognizing chirographs input into a computer system, comprising: providing a primary recognizer for converting chirographs to shape indexes, the primary recognizer providing output including a shape index when a chirograph is input thereto; providing a plurality of secondary recognizers to convert chirographs into code points, and associating the secondary recognizers with at least some of the shape indexes; receiving a chirograph; providing the chirograph to the primary recognizer and receiving a shape index therefrom; determining by a separate look-up process whether one of the secondary recognizers is associated with the shape index, and if so, selecting that secondary recognizer as a selected secondary recognizer and passing the chirograph to the selected secondary recognizer, the secondary recognizer returning a code point; and training the secondary recognizers by providing a first training set comprising a plurality of chirographs and actual code points for each chirograph, wherein training the secondary recognizers further comprises determining a plurality of distinguishing features of chirographs based on predetermined criteria corresponding to questions, and wherein training the secondary recognizers further comprises determining a question ordering by measuring the quality of each question.