Human and Machine Readable Handwritten Language?

darrint writes "In some obscure corner of the Earth, has someone developed a human handwritten language which can be easily read by a machine? Why is the visual divide between what can be written by a human and what can be read by a machine so wide? At one extreme is the bar code, which I certainly cannot hand write. Machines can read it easily. Bank checks have a human readable account and routing numbers printed in special ink running along their bottom margins. These numbers can be read by a machine and are clearly legible to a human, but I doubt I could write them for input to a machine. My old Palm handheld could read something like handwriting in its little box. OCR exists but I've never thought of it as reliable. I would like to dash off little notes on stickies or in a tiny spiral notebook and be able to suck them into vim, a browser text-input box, and so forth. Perhaps I'd have to learn some kind of machine readable 'shorthand.' Has it been done?"

Comments

I believe it has been done

[the_other_one]

I'm old enough to have filled in punch cards with a pencil. Does that count?

Ideal handwriting style

[philgross]

Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.

OCR/handwriting recognition folks: what would the ideal handwriting for machine readability look like? Could simple variations on standard English cursive or printing approach 100% recognizability, or would the ideal have to be synthesized, like shorthand, and if so, what characteristics would such a script have?

Re:Ideal handwriting style

[gameforge]

Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.

Okay. I'm attacking the point of the post.

There's no reason to reinvent the alphabet any more than there is reinvent the wheel.

If we change the alphabet so machines can read it, other people stop being able to read it. It's the wrong solution for the problem.

If my handwriting is good enough that I can read it two weeks later, and my peers and friends and family can read it perfectly (i've been told I have particularly good handwriting) then why should I have to change it so that my PC can understand it, but nobody else can?

I could memorize a second alphabet, having one for me and one for my PC... but why?

If I could tell the software "This is how I write a 'k' and this is how I write an 'R'", that would improve things a lot IMO. My 'k' might look like someone else's 'R'; but my 'k' and 'R' look absolutely nothing alike. My ampersand kind of looks like a plus sign; but it's totally distinguishable from my plus sign. If I could dawn this on the software...

PDAs cheat

[r00t]

They don't read from paper. They can get extra info:

* pressure
* speed
* stroke order
* stroke direction
* pen-up and pen-down events
* timing

OCR Reliability

[N3Bruce]

The typical account information line printed at the bottom of your typical credit card statement or utility bill is printed in a font known as OCR-A. Equipment for machine reading this type of font has been around for over 25 years, such as some of the old Banctec 4300 series workstations used for processing bill payments and checks. Even these 1970s era machines had better than a 95 percent read rate of the entire account information line, provided that the printing was clear and properly placed. Later machines, such as the NCR 7780 or the OPEX Eagle can have better than a 99 percent read rate of a full line of characters. Again, the usual limitations on reliability of OCR characters are a result of poor or mislocated printing, or stray marks in the OCR field. Here is the obligatory Wikipedia link if you interested in finding out a bit more about the history of Optical Character Recognition.

MICR fonts, which are those funny looking numbers printed in magnetic ink at the bottom of most checks are designed to be human recognizable but machine readable, and have been around since the '60s. OCRA typically beats MICR today, but a good MICR line is still readable over 95 percent of the time.

Handwritten fonts are the most difficult to read, but the technology has been available to read handwritten numbers and letters for over 10 years, but typical read rates for something like a handwritten zip code or the numerical amount written on a check range from 60 to 80 percent, and are slowly getting better. Again, a lot depends on how much care is taken when writing out the text, and what kind of background clutter is present.

As for me, I typed out school reports in 8th grade in 1973, when our family's word processing hardware consisted of a 1940's vintage Underwood typewriter. Even humans had difficulty decoding my handwriting!

Re:I believe it has been done

[shadow demon]

Somewhat off topic, but there was a certain language that functioned like what you described, just not with numbers. It is called aUI (with that capitlaization) and was created in the 50s by Prof. John Weilgart, a (bored) psychologist. The language is composed of 42 very simple ideographic "letters" that each have both a meaning and set pronunciation. The letters combine to form concepts that can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them, and the latest edition of edition of his book (1979) has a dictionary of over 4000 words. It was made so that only the most general concepts (plus the numbers 0-10) would be classified as single letters, and I think this system works very well. I really suggest you check it out if you have any interest in languages or communication, but the information available online is somewhat limited. I was able to get his book, aUI, the Language of Space, through an interlibrary loan, but I am pretty sure it is long out of print. I really think this language has a much greater chance of being useful than anything based on numbers, and since it only uses very basic shapes (e.g. number shapes, a spiral, circle, oval, etc.) it could probably be recognized pretty easily by OCR systems, probably as well as or better than current print-letter recognition.