Offline Handwriting Recognition app through pattern matching in Android

Question

I'm thinking about developing an application for offline Handwriting Recognition using neural network. I want to develop an application that will help me first train the system by taking in patterns from the user, and matching them to certain alphabets. And then use this trained system for Handwriting Recognition. I want to know how to save the images and how to map them to characters? Storing them as individual images and maintaining a database to match them to their corresponding alphabets will make the application quite heavy. Any other ideas for storing patterns and later matching them? Not much acquainted with storage and backend activities in android :(

Answer 1

You might want to examine the structure and results of the Handprinting Recognition contest, held by "Dr. Dobb's Journal":

http://drdobbs.com/security/184408923?pgno=2

Answer 2

There are different ways to implement this, but the usual idea is to store the user input in some sort of vector format. An easy way is to store just the coordinates of the points the user touches on the screen, possibly normalizing them so they are not dependent on physical screen size (e.g., remap to a virtual 400x400 screen, etc.)