A system for recognizing online handwritten mathematical expressions by using improved structural analysis

A system for recognizing online handwritten mathematical expressions (MEs), by applying improved structural analysis, is proposed and experimentally evaluated on two databases. With this system, MEs are represented in the form of stochastic context-free grammar (SCFG), and the Cocke-Younger-Kasami (CYK) algorithm is used to parse two-dimensional (2D) structures of online handwritten MEs and select the best interpretation in terms of the results of symbol segmentation and recognition as well as structural analysis. A concept of "body box" is proposed, and two SVM models are applied for learning and analyzing structural relations from training patterns without the need for any heuristic decisions. Stroke order is used to reduce the complexity of the parsing algorithm. Even though SCFG does not resolve ambiguities in some cases, the proposed system still gives users a list of candidates that contains the expected result. The results of experimental evaluations of the proposed system on the CROHME 2013 and CROHME 2014 databases and on an in-house ("Hand-Math") database show that the recognition rate of the proposed system is improved, while the processing time on a common CPU is kept to a practical level.