Handwriting recognition

Finally, the paper, I wrote about in my last post was submitted today. The date was postponed twice. That’s why I did not have much time the last month.

It was a lot of hard work. Especially the evaluation of the webservice, I implemented. I performed a lot of tests and repeated them very often, because of some bugs in mine and in other’s source code.

Now, since this chapter is closed, I can fully concentrate on my diploma thesis. I startet writing nearly two weeks ago. The output is  rather small :( and I’m still not in a “flow”, but hopefully it will be better in some days.

The webservice is almost complete, just some little things that need to be changed after the evaluation. The only thing that is left for implementing is the ebook reader iLiad. I already startet to code some stuff, but the hardest work, the GUI, is still to come.

To get some ideas for the graphical user interface of the iLiad application I talked to my supervisor. We did some brainstorming and here is the result:

There are two areas. One analog area wherein the user writes his text and a digital area where the result will be shown.

In the digital area you can see the following:

1. The recognized text. In difference to the first two UI suggestions there is a novel functionality. Not only the best, but the first two (or maybe more) alternatives for each word are shown. So the user needs less interaction to choose the right one. If the alternatives are still wrong the user can click on the three dots and a list with further alternatives will appear.
2. Above each alternative iDocument found information about, there are the icons that were introduced in the first UI example. The difference is, that the user chooses the right one by clicking on it. Only if he wants to see further information about the instance, he needs to click on the little triangle and the known popup window appears.
3. On the right side of the digital area there are the action buttons. The actions were introduced in a former post. Nothing changed.

I think this is a very good solution for an intuitive user interface. And beside that there are as less interactions as possible. I hope this all works with the GTK+ (http://www.gtk.org/) framework…

A long time passed since I wrote the last entry. Sorry for that, but there were some really big problems I ran into. In the last three weeks I tried to compile some C++ source and some libraries for the ebook reader iLiad. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but that device uses an ARM CPU. Thus I can’t simply compile my code. No. Instead I need to cross compile anything. That means I need to compile code for an architecture that is different to the one I use.

First I tried to compile it with arm-linux-gcc, this didn’t work at all. Afterwards I used scratchbox (http://www.scratchbox.org/) and an inofficial toolchain for the iLiad. And finally, in the last week, it worked. Tanks to an advisor of mine who helped me a lot (you know who I mean :)

I am so happy that it works now. But although, it took three weeks that are now lost. Anyway. I can now proceed in caring about problems regarding my diploma thesis.

Here’s a new suggestion of the iLiad UI. I introduce two areas. One for writing with the pen (“analog area”) and a second one for choosing the right text (“digital area”). Choosing the text - by a drop down box - and the semantic information - even by a new drop down box - stays the same as in the former UI suggestion. Take a look:

Below the digital area you can choose what to do with the chosen text (I will write a new post for this topic).

I tried to build a litte iLiad UI demo, but didn’t know how to do it. So I did it by drawing with a pen :)

Figure 1 shows the complete UI. There is an area where users can write on, a log area where the status messages are shown and a send button for sending new text to the webservice (actually to the bridge). The icons above some words show the information that iDocument found. That could be a “person” or a “project” or others.

If the user clicks on a word (see figure 2), a list with alternatives will pop up. So he can choose the right one, if it was recognized wrong.

A click on one of the icons can pop up a little window that shows information about this instance. This might be the uri of a person. (Figure 3)