Search Engines for Handwritten Documents

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Massachusetts have created a tool for automatically searching handwritten historical documents, such as the 140,000 pages that make up George Washington's personal papers in the Library of Congress. The most interesting part is that the papers are scanned versions of the originals and the search tool actually recognizes the handwritten text from these images."

This is nothing new

[42forty-two42]

Google already did it! [google.com] Well, it's not handwritten, but that's just a logical progression.

Re:Umm

[mishmash]

Popular handwriting recognition software doesn't work like that - it gains much of it's information from the "pen" strokes used to create the letters. There's less information in a "finished" printed page than you'd get by tracking the movements a pen made to write it. For an example of this different approach see this paper describing handwriting recognition using pen mounted accelerometers [grenoble-soc.com].