PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The increasing popularity of whiteboards as a popular tool in meeting rooms has been accompanied by a growing interest in making use of the whiteboard as a user interface for human-computer interaction. Therefore, systems based on electronic whiteboards have been developed in order to serve as meeting assistants for, e.g., collaborative working. However, as special pens and erasers are required, natural interaction is restricted. In order to render this communication method more natural, it was proposed to retain ordinary whiteboard and pens and to visually observe the writing process using a video camera [22, 25]. In this paper a prototype system for automatic video-based whiteboard reading is presented. The system is designed for recognizing unconstrained handwritten text and is further characterized by an incremental processing strategy in order to facilitate recognizing portions of text as soon as they have been written on the board. We will present the methods employed for extracting text regions, preprocessing, feature extraction, and statistical modeling and recognition. Evaluation results on a writer-independent unconstrained handwriting recognition task demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.