Dynamic candidate keypad for stroke-based Chinese input method on touchscreen devices

With the popularity of touchscreen devices, physical button-based keyboards are being replaced by finger-operated virtual keyboards. Entering text on these touchscreen devices is no longer limited by finger tapping activities on the keys. Text input can be performed by finger sliding over the virtual keyboard, which is well realized by the Swype technology on a typical QWERTY keyboard. Such shorthand gesturing for text input, however, may be inefficient when directly applied to Chinese input, especially in Chinese stroke-based input method. In this paper, a novel dynamic candidate keypad with use of unidirectional finger gesture on the stroke key for character selection is proposed for enhancing stroke-based Chinese input method. The new design can enhance frequently used Chinese characters searching and input using stroke-based input. The new method is implemented on the Android 2.2 platform for performance evaluation using Traditional Chinese characters set. Experimental results show that the proposed method enables users to input popular Chinese characters easier than conventional stroke-based input methods.