Hierarchical Decomposition of Handwriting Deformation Vector Field Using 2D Warping and Global/Local Affine Transformation

This paper addresses the basic problem of how to extract, describe, and evaluate handwriting deformation from not the statistical but the deterministic viewpoint. The key ideas are threefold. The first idea is to apply 2D warping to extraction of handwriting deformation vector field (DVF) between a pair of input and target images. The second idea is to hierarchically decompose the DVF by a parametric deformation model of global/local affine transformation. As a result, the DVF is expressed by a series of deformation components each of which is characterized by a window size of local affine transformation. The third idea is interrupting of the series of deformation components to obtain natural, reasonable handwriting deformation. Experiments using the handwritten numeral database IPTP CDROM1B show that 31.1% of the handwriting DVF is expressed by global affine transformation, and the subsequent few local affine transformations successfully discriminate natural handwriting deformation from unnatural one.