1

I am attempting to develop an Android app that allows a user to write notes with their finger onto a canvas,

what i would like is to convert these "drawings" x/y coordinates into text.

does anyone know of an open source library that can perform the required conversion?

MBMJ
  • 5,323
  • 8
  • 32
  • 51
Hector
  • 4,016
  • 21
  • 112
  • 211
  • Which x/y coordinates are you interested in? Are you allowing the user to draw freely like MSPaint / Skitch? If so, what x/y coordinates do you want? – Jimmy Jun 14 '12 at 07:55
  • in my custom view i obtain the Motion events x and y coordinates from within the onTouch() method. i have a List of Lists holding each "stroke" the user makes on the screen. its these x and y coordinates i would like to convert to text – Hector Jun 14 '12 at 10:25

1 Answers1

4

To create gesture that matches letters:

You can use the GestureBuilder Sample Project from the SDK.

Do New Project > Android Sample Project > GestureBuilder ...

Make sure you installed the available samples from the SDK Manager.

To recognize gestures:

Take a look at this tutorial.

About libraries:

There is some libraries about gesture reconginition out there. But I don't think there is any library that will convert coordinates directly to a letter.

There is already a build-in gesture recongnotion system in android.

Why not use it ? http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/gestures.html

I hope all this will help you. :)

EDIT:

You can also take a look at this question.

OCR means Optical character recognition. This is not exactly what you are looking for, but i thougth you could try to convert gestures to images and then process them with tesseract.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Timothée Jeannin
  • 9,652
  • 2
  • 56
  • 65
  • thanks for your time. Yes OCR isnt really what i need, i threw that in as thats the closest GOOGLE would give me, i hadnt considered "Gestures" at all i will give it a look, thanks again – Hector Jun 14 '12 at 10:27
  • i can recognise "most" of the alphabet and numerics, however my users will be forced to enter each letter separately. is it possible to detect "joined up" writing? – Hector Jun 14 '12 at 15:50
  • It seems to be kind of a hard task to detect "joined up" writing using only gestures ... Spliting letters will be hard to achieve ... Perhaps you can give OCR a try like I said in my edit. But keep in mind it's going to be a lot more work that using gestures. – Timothée Jeannin Jun 15 '12 at 08:23