| Summary: | Thesis (S.B. and M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999. === Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-59). === This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. === In recent years, the recognition of handwritten mathematical expressions has received an increasing amount of attention in pattern recognition research. The diversity of approaches to the problem and the lack of a commercially viable system, however, indicate that there is still much research to be done in this area. In this thesis, I will describe an on-line approach for converting a handwritten mathematical expression into an equivalent expression in a typesetting command language such as TEX or MathML, as well as a feedback-oriented user interface which can make errors more tolerable to the end user since they can be quickly corrected. The three primary components of this system are a method for classifying isolated handwritten symbols, an algorithm for partitioning an expression into symbols, and an algorithm for converting a two-dimensional arrangements of symbols into a typeset expression. For symbol classification, a Gaussian classifier is used to rank order the interpretations of a set of strokes as a single symbol. To partition an expression, the values generated by the symbol classifier are used to perform a constrained search of possible partitions for the one with the minimum summed cost. Finally, the expression is parsed using a simple geometric grammar. === by Nicholas E. Matsakis. === S.B.and M.Eng.
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