Handwriting Recognition System Leveraging Vibration Signal on Smartphones

The efficiency of human-computer interaction is greatly hindered by the small size of the touch screens on mobile devices, such as smart phones and watches. This has prompted widespread interest in handwriting recognition systems, which can be divided into active and passive systems. Active systems require additional hardware devices to perceive movements of handwriting or the tracking accuracy is not adequate for handwriting recognition. Passive methods use the acoustic signal of pen rubbing and are susceptible to environmental noise (above 60dB). This paper presents a novel handwriting recognition system based on vibration signals detected by the built-in accelerometer of smartphones. The proposed scheme is implemented in three stages: signal segmentation, signal recognition, and word suggestion. VibWriter is highly resistant to interferences since the normal environmental noise (below 70dB) will not cause the vibration of the accelerometer. Extensive experiments demonstrated the efficacy of the system in terms of accuracy in letter recognition (75.3%), word recognition (86.4%) and number recognition (79%) in a variety of writing positions under a variety of environmental conditions.

Automated summary

The small size of mobile touch screens, such as smartphones and watches, greatly hinders the efficiency of human-computer interaction. This has led to a growing interest in handwriting recognition systems, which can be categorized into active and passive systems. Active systems require additional hardware devices or have insufficient tracking accuracy for handwriting recognition. Passive methods use acoustic signals but are susceptible to environmental noise. This paper presents a novel handwriting recognition system based on vibration signals detected by the built-in accelerometer of smartphones. The system achieves high resistance to interferences and demonstrates promising accuracy in various writing positions and environmental conditions.