A Syntactic Approach for Handwritten Mathematical Formula Recognition

Mathematical formulas are good examples of two-dimensional patterns as well as pictures or graphics. The use of syntactic methods is useful for interpreting such complex patterns. In this paper we propose a system for the interpretation of 2-D mathematic formulas based on a syntactic parser. This system is able to recognize a large class of 2-D mathematic formulas written on a graphic tablet. It starts the parsing by localization of the ``principal'' operator in the formula and attempts to partition it into subexpressions which are similarly analyzed by looking for a starting character. The generalized parser used in the system has been developed in our group for continuous speech recognition and picture interpretation.