A Semi-automatic Annotation Scheme for Bangla Online Mixed Cursive Handwriting Samples

Requirement of annotated handwriting samples for the development of relevant recognition algorithms is an established fact. Although such annotated databases of unconstrained handwriting exist for several scripts of a few languages, the same is not true for any of the scripts of India. As far as Indian scripts are concerned a few databases of handwritten isolated characters are publicly available. These include samples of both online and offline handwriting. However, no such publicly available database of unconstrained handwriting in any of the Indian scripts exists. On the other hand, unconstrained handwriting in Bangla, the second most popular among Indian scripts, is mixed cursive in nature unlike the other scripts of India. Thus, annotation of Bangla unconstrained handwriting samples needs special consideration. During the last few years our group at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata has been working towards the development of a large annotated database of online Bangla handwriting samples and has developed a GUI-based semi-automatic scheme for their annotation at character boundary levels and a scheme for XML representation of such annotated data. The present system implemented for annotation of unconstrained handwriting of Bangla may easily be customized for other scripts. Currently this system is in use for annotation of a large database of Bangla unconstrained online handwriting.