Soviet Firm Has Impressive Cursive Recognition Technology

Reports of what may be a big leap forward in cursive, connected handwriting recognition are coming out of the USSR in the form of a PC-based script recognizer system. The system, called CalliGraph, is a joint USSR-US venture with development handled by a Russian company named ParaGraph and the US end by Astarte Computer Systems, a venture capital firm in Boulder, Colorado.

In the ParaGraph demonstration, users write in script on a piece of paper placed on top of a pressure-sensitive tablet that’s connected to a PC. The handwriting is displayed on the screen as cursive script, then converted to disconnected ASCII characters in a selected font. To accomplish recognition, the software takes in a string of data, breaks the string into a series of key shapes and features (ascenders, descenders, and the like), and then tries to identify the letters by comparing the features and looking for matching shapes in a built-in dictionary.

Microsoft Is Interested

ParaGraph has for several months been quietly showing this technology to US companies involved in pen-based development and one of the biggest players, Microsoft, has confirmed that “it is working with ParaGraph.” According to Pen Windows product manager, Pradeep Singh, “we’re very pleased with what they’re doing.”

One engineer who has evaluated the system told us that system performance is probably acceptable, at least considering the early stage of development. An opposing view was offered by another engineer who criticized performance because of the time it takes to scan and analyze shapes, look up the corresponding features in the multi-megabyte dictionary, and display the results on the screen.

Finally, another recognition expert who has not seen the system but who has read about it told us that this approach was examined by OCR developers a number of years ago and discarded because “it really isn’t the best solution.”

A spokesman for Astarte declined to discuss any of the technical details about how the system works, although he did say the company was preparing a technical backgrounder that should be available soon. Nor would he comment on what companies are interested in adopting Calligraph; instead stating that Astarte is “actively pursuing” licensing agreements with all the major players. In any event, Calligraph may be an important step forward and certainly bears watching. We’ll be keeping you updated on its development.