Segmenting Handwritten Math Symbols Using AdaBoost and Multi-scale Shape Context Features

This paper presents a new symbol segmentation method based on AdaBoost with confidence weighted predictions for online handwritten mathematical expressions. The handwritten mathematical expression is preprocessed and rendered to an image. Then for each stroke, we compute three kinds of shape context features (stroke pair, local neighborhood and global shape contexts) with different scales, 21 stroke pair geometric features and symbol classification scores for the current stroke and stroke pair. The stroke pair shape context features covers the current stroke and the following stroke in time series. The local neighborhood shape context features includes the current stroke and its three nearest neighbor strokes in distance while the global shape context features covers the expression. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used for dimensionality reduction. We use AdaBoost with confidence weighted predictions for classification. The method does not use any language model. To our best knowledge, there is no previous work which uses shape context features for symbol segmentation. Experiment results show the new symbol segmentation method achieves good recall and precision on the CROHME 2012 dataset.