Ink Analysis

For an application that accepts mixed handwriting and drawing input, the ability to distinguish between handwriting and drawing and to group handwriting into subcategories, such as recognition segments, lines, and paragraphs, is very useful.

Ink Analysis Library

The ink analysis APIs effectively combine two distinct but complimentary technologies: handwriting recognition and ink analyzing. Combining these two technologies gives definitively greater results than the parts taken alone.

Handwriting recognition is the computational analysis of handwritten digital ink to return character-based interpretation in a given language. That is, handwriting recognition is how the computer "reads" a person's handwriting.

Ink analyzing can be further broken down into ink classification and layout analysis. Ink classification is the computational division of ink into semantically meaningful units such as paragraphs, lines, words, and drawings. Layout analysis is the computational examination of ink input to determine the position of the ink on the inking surface and how the strokes relate to each other spatially and even semantically.

For details on how to use the Ink Analyis APIs, see Ink Analysis Overview.