A handwriting understanding environment (HUE) for research in document and handwriting processing

Researchers in the fields of document processing and handwriting analysis and recognition increasingly need to construct elaborate software systems to investigate and evaluate new research components such as cursive handwriting algorithms, contextual recognition systems and document parsing tools. Although a number of commercial and public-domain image processing frameworks already exist, for example Khoros, KBVision and the Image Understanding Environment (IUE) none of these systems fully supports the cycle of research, software development, informal and formal evaluation which is typically required by the research community. TABS (The Almost a Blackboard System) was originally developed to address this problem by providing a library of domain-specific image processing and computer vision components within a small, efficient, and easily accessible Tcl Tk script-based software framework. TABS was evaluated over a period of more than a year, and has now been rewritten and extended to produce HUE, a handwriting understanding environment which provides a rapid prototyping environment for document and handwriting research. We review the features of HUE, and illustrate its use with a realistic research evaluation example.