Magazine Launches Handwriting Recognition Contest

Dr. Dobb’s Journal (DDJ), a magazine for advanced programmers, has announced the first-ever contest of handwriting recognition software. The first-prize winner of the challenge will win a Macintosh PowerBook 100 provided by Apple Computer.

The contest officially begins on June 15, 1992 when source code, test data, and contest entry blank will be available electronically and by mail. The deadline for submissions is September 15, 1992 and the winner will be announced in December, 1992.

Contestants don’t need a pen computer or pen operating system to participate. Dr. Dobb’s will be providing a platform-independent test harness that, in the most general case, allows you to plug in your C function and check the results. The test harness is 200 lines of C code, and written by Ron Avitzur (who authored an April 1992 article in Dr. Dobb’s Journal that presents the complete source code for a “roll-your-own” handprinting recognition engine) to run as a batch process using the standard I/O library functions. This code has been tested on the Macintosh, SPARC, and DOS platforms. On the PC, the code compiles with both Borland and Microsoft compilers.

The harness processes a data file containing stored “ink” (stylus data points). The data in this file represents characters that were captured with an interactive program, from at least a dozen different individuals. The test alphabet consists of alphanumeric characters and some punctuation marks. There are multiple instances of each character, some of which are used for training the recognizer (if your engine requires this), and the rest for testing.

During the training phase, the test harness reads multiple instances of characters and, for each instance, calls your recognizer’s training routine, which is named Train(). Then, during the testing phase, the harness calls your recognizer’s recognition routine, named Guess(), with a different set of instances of each character. Both Train() and Guess() are passed pointers to an in-memory data structure representing the strokes that compose a character. Your routines must know how to parse this data structure. To serve as a guide, DDJ is publishing both the test harness and a sample recognizer that works with that harness. The harness, sample recognizer, and a small data file are all available now.

Additionally, Avitzur has implemented an interactive ink capture program that currently runs on the Macintosh (see the April issue of DDJ). That version stored ink data in processed form rather than as raw data points; it is now available in an updated version that reads and writes raw ink data files. DDJ is in the process of writing an equivalent program for Microsoft Windows, to be ready by June 15, 1992.

For more information on the contest, contact Dr. Dobb’s Journal, 411 Borel Ave., San Mateo, CA 94402; 415-358-9500.