Recovery of temporal information of cursively handwritten words for on-line recognition

On-line recognition differs from off-line recognition in that additional information about the drawing order of the strokes is available. This temporal information makes it easier to recognize handwritten texts with an on-line recognition system. In this paper we present a method for the recovery of the stroke order from static handwritten images. The algorithm was tested by classifying the words of an off-line database with a state-of-the-art on-line recognition system. On this database with 150 different words, written by four cooperative writers, a recognition rate of 97.4% was obtained.