Confidence Property [About Recognition]

To obtain a level of confidence for each recognition result, you can get either the Confidence property of the RecognitionAlternate object or the Confidence property of the Gesture object. The confidence level is a number that indicates the degree of confidence for each alternate recognition result that the recognizer returns for a corresponding recognition segment.

Confidence is returned as low, average, or high. The application uses these results to:

  • Indicate to the user that multiple possibilities exist.
  • Rank the alternates by confidence level.

What Affects Confidence

Some of the things that make handwriting recognition difficult and affect confidence include:

  • Difficulty determining word segmentation

image showing writing that is too close

  • Case difficulties

image showing difficulties with handwritten versions of the word "case"

  • Uncommon writing styles
  • Isolated punctuation

image showing quotation marks that are too far away from text

  • Accented characters in English recognizers

Note

Confidence evaluation is available only for United States English and all gesture recognizers in this release. Methods that provide the confidence property for any other recognizer will return E_NOTIMPL.