Using Off-line Features and Synthetic Data for On-line Handwritten Math Symbol Recognition

Abstract—We present an approach for on-line recognition of handwritten math symbols using adaptations of off-line features and synthetic data generation. We compare the performance of our approach using four different classification methods: AdaBoost.M1 with C4.5 decision trees, Random Forests and Support-Vector Machines with linear and Gaussian kernels. Despite the fact that timing information can be extracted from on-line data, our feature set is based on shape description for greater tolerance to variations of the drawing process. Our main datasets come from the Competition on Recognition of Online Handwritten Mathematical Expressions (CROHME) 2012 and 2013. Class representation bias in CROHME datasets is mitigated by generating samples for underrepresented classes using an elastic distortion model. Our results show that generation of synthetic data for underrepresented classes might lead to improvements of the average per-class accuracy. We also tested our system using the MathBrush dataset achieving a top-1 accuracy of 89.87 % which is comparable with the best results of other recently published approaches on the same dataset