Scribble matching

摘要

The present invention relates to scribble matching methods ie methods for searching samples of electronic ink without having first to translate the ink into ASCII text. The methods of the present invention find application in pen-based computer devices. The invention entails the identification and encoding of velocity minima in the input scribble. Three scribble matching algorithms are described - a syntactic matcher, a word matcher and an elastic matcher. The syntactic matcher encodes the input scribble according to the shape of the scribble in the region of the velocity minima. The word matcher encodes the input scribble according to the heights of the velocity minima from a reference line, using a continuous height encoding scheme. The elastic matcher encodes the input scribble according to a classification of the velocity minima and intermediate points. The use of velocity minima in the encoding of scribble input provides a stable set of points and leads to improved performance in comparison with known scribble matching methods. $$