Recovery of drawing order from scanned images of multi-stroke handwriting

Describes a method to recover the drawing order of a multi-stroke handwritten script from a binary 2D image. First, we construct a graph from the scanned image by applying a thinning process and extracting the skeletal pixels. Next, we identify the start or end vertices in the graph, and then globally analyze the graph to label it by determining the types of each vertex and each edge. Finally, we trace all the strokes using the labeling information and recover the drawing order. The method does not enumerate the possible drawing orders and does not cause a combinatorial explosion, even if the script is very complex. By recovering the drawing order of a handwritten script, the temporal information can be recovered from a scanned image. Hence, this method can be used as a bridge from the offline handwriting character recognition problem to the online one.