How does MyScript work?

Handwriting is something very personal: everyone writes differently. To effectively recognize handwriting it is important to take these variations into account.

MyScript does this thanks to pattern recognition technology. This technology allows MyScript to learn to understand how people write a language. When new writing is presented to it, MyScript can give projections by drawing on the prior examples it has seen, not just by making a simple comparison with a standard symbol.

MyScript learns thus from experience how each letter can look and how to understand a multitude of writing styles in different Western and Asian languages.

MyScript^® handwriting recognition engine

The MyScript Recognition Engine : This is where it all happens inside MyScript® technology. The diagram below shows concisely the way the MyScript recognition engine works.

In the engine the data input is transformed into computer-readable information. To do so, the engine relies on the work of three "experts" that process the handwriting:

The Character Expert

The Character Expert extracts character features, recognizes them individually and classifies them in accordance with the alphabet you wish to recognize.

The Segmentation Expert

The Segmentation Expert analyzes digital ink and decides where strokes can be divided into characters and words. The segmentation expert's job is to split the text up into meaningful segments.

Let's tackle an example. We'll write the word "by". Here there is only one stroke, the pen is set down once and lifted only once.

You can see that this segmentation could give "b" and "y" or "l", "r" and "j".

The Language Expert

The Language Expert uses linguistic information (lexicons, regular expressions, language models, etc.) to identify language elements.

These three experts work together simultaneously to analyze all data and find potential recognition results.

The experts rely on resources: files that give the necessary linguistic information (about alphabets, character subsets etc.) to recognize and understand handwriting with the highest possible accuracy. MyScript Software Development Kits (SDKs) contain all these resources, prepared by Vision Objects linguistic experts. The SDKs also contain tools for development of custom linguistic resources (lexicons and Data Formats), that boost the recognition accuracy of recognizing specific information, such as product references, brand names, etc.

Well chosen linguistic resources are the key to developing powerful solutions with MyScript!