D-Pen: a digital pen system for public and business enterprises

A data entry system named "D-Pen: digital pen system" was developed. D-Pen requires a built-in intelligent character recognition (ICR) and can be applied to various data entry applications, such as middleware for paper-based data entry processes. Two important problems concerning the built-in ICR must therefore be solved: (1) support various character fields of business forms; (2) recognize various character-string entries in the fields. To solve these problems, a logical structural expression is defined to represent the logical relation among all the frames for characters, strings, and marks on a form. A method for layout-driven character string recognition based on a divide-and-conquer method was also developed. Evaluation tests with volunteers showed that the recognition rate for samples of 71 Japanese address name is 87% without any errors.