U. Glaeser

FIGURE 42.45 Ink retrieval using keywords. Example of an application that uses the ASCII tags associated with
handwritten ink to retrieve information from handwritten documents.
FIGURE 42.46
of documents.
Ink management software on the notebook PC allows users to archive handwritten notes and retrieve
them, using either the time of creation of the handwritten notes or the tags associated with keywords.
The tags are typically text strings created using a handwriting recognition system. Figure 42.45 shows an
example of a piece of the ink management software that displays blocks of ink marked as keywords in
the middle column and their tags in the left column. Users can retrieve handwritten documents by
clicking on the keywords or typing a word in the search text box in the upper righthand-top corner of
the application.
In the application shown in Fig. 42.45, all the tags are text strings; however, one can easily extend the
retrieval paradigm to use graphical queries and retrieve documents containing graphics, using features
extracted from the graphical query. An example of this is shown in Fig. 42.46.
Gesture Recognition
A gesture is a set of handwritten ink that implies a certain action. In many cases, a gesture can be used
to represent an action much more efficiently compared to enumerating the action through a set of
keyboard events. An example is the task of moving a portion of text from one position to another. Using
a keyboard would involve selecting the portion of ink to be moved, copying it into a clipboard, deleting
the selection, moving the cursor to the place in the document where the user would like to place the ink,
and finally pasting the ink. Using a pen would allow users to indicate the same action by drawing a
selection area around the ink to be moved and an arrow indicating the position to move the selection
to. An example of this is shown in Fig. 42.47.
© 2002 by CRC Press LLC
Ink searching example. Users can search for an ink pattern inside a longer ink document, or collection