UsiGesture: An environment for integrating pen-based interaction in user interface development

Several algorithms have been developed for pen-based gesture recognition. Yet, their integration in streamline engineering of interactive systems is bound to several shortcomings: they are hard to compare to each other, determining which one is the most suitable in which situation is a research problem, their performance largely vary depending on contextual parameters that are hard to predict, their fine-tuning in a real interactive application is a challenge. In order to address these shortcomings, we developed UsiGesture, an engineering method and a software support platform that accommodates multiple algorithms for pen-based gesture recognition in order to integrate them in a straightforward way into interactive computing systems. The method is aimed at providing designers and developers with support for the following steps: defining a dataset that is appropriate for an interactive system (e.g., made of commands, symbols, characters), determining the most suitable gesture recognition algorithm depending on contextual variables (e.g., user, platform, environment), fine-tuning the parameters of this algorithm by multi-criteria optimization (e.g., system speed and recognition rate vs. human distinguishability and perception), and incorporation of the fine-tuned algorithm in an integrated development environment for engineering interactive systems.