Patent ID: 7302106

Claim:
A computer-implemented process for compressing digital pen stroke data, comprising the process actions of: describing a digital pen stroke as a curve defined by a set of points; reducing the number of points necessary to describe said curve by computing a chordal deviation between the points of the original pen stroke curve and corresponding points of a simplified curve to determine which points to eliminate in order to produce a simplified curve representing the pen stroke, wherein reducing the number of points to produce a simplified curve further comprises: for a set of points defining a stroke, (a) computing a chordal deviation between the simplified stroke curve and the original stroke curve for each corresponding point of the stroke; (b) finding the point p with the minimum chordal deviation; (c) if the chordal deviation of p is less than a prescribed maximum chordal deviation, (d) removing the point with the minimum chordal deviation; (e) re-computing the chordal deviations for the two points that are the neighbors of the removed point; repeating the process actions (b) through (e) until the chordal deviation of all points is greater than a prescribed maximum chordal deviation, or a prescribed number of allowable points that define said simplified curve has been reached.