Segmentation and recognition of vocalized outlines in Pitman shorthand

There is a wish to be able to enter text into mobile computing devices at the speed of speech. Only handwritten shorthand schemes can achieve this data recording rate. A novel approach to the recognition of vocalized outlines in Pitman´s shorthand is proposed in this paper. In this approach, the recognition process is divided into two steps. The consonant outline is first recognized by a two-stage (segmentation and classification) approach. Afterwards surrounding vowel and diphthong symbols are classified and their positions in relation to an associated consonant stroke are determined. Promising results of over 70% recognition accuracy have been obtained.