System and method for shape recognition of hand-drawn objects
First Claim
1. A computer system for recognizing a hand-drawn shape, comprising:
- a shape recognizer for receiving from a user, a hand-drawn ink input representing a diagram, flow chart, or both;
a container recognizer operably coupled to the shape recognizer for performing container recognition that identifies a plurality of closed containers within ink input; and
a connector recognizer operably coupled to the shape recognizer for identifying a connector within ink input that connects the plurality of closed containers, wherein the identifying of the connector includes identifying a skeleton stroke, an arrowhead stroke, or both, by breaking the connector into pieces at cusps, which are points of high curvature within the connector; and
a grouper operably coupled to the shape recognizer for grouping the plurality of containers with the connector by automatically adjusting one or more properties of at least one of the plurality of containers, the connector, or both, such that the plurality of containers and the connector are considered joined, thus allowing the user to create the diagram, flow chart, or both without concern for a stroke input order, a number of strokes used, or both.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A system and method for shape recognition of hand-drawn objects is provided. A shape recognizer may recognize a drawing such as a diagram or chart from ink input by recognizing closed containers and/or unclosed connectors in the drawing. The closed containers may represent any number of shapes that may be recognized including circles, ellipses, triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons, and so forth. The unclosed connectors may be any type of connector including lines, curves, arrows, and so forth. Polylines may be used to approximate a skeleton of a connector for handling continuation strokes, overlapping strokes and over-tracing strokes of the skeleton. By using the present invention, a user may draw diagrams and flow charts freely and without restrictions on the hand-drawn input.
58 Citations
45 Claims
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1. A computer system for recognizing a hand-drawn shape, comprising:
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a shape recognizer for receiving from a user, a hand-drawn ink input representing a diagram, flow chart, or both; a container recognizer operably coupled to the shape recognizer for performing container recognition that identifies a plurality of closed containers within ink input; and a connector recognizer operably coupled to the shape recognizer for identifying a connector within ink input that connects the plurality of closed containers, wherein the identifying of the connector includes identifying a skeleton stroke, an arrowhead stroke, or both, by breaking the connector into pieces at cusps, which are points of high curvature within the connector; and a grouper operably coupled to the shape recognizer for grouping the plurality of containers with the connector by automatically adjusting one or more properties of at least one of the plurality of containers, the connector, or both, such that the plurality of containers and the connector are considered joined, thus allowing the user to create the diagram, flow chart, or both without concern for a stroke input order, a number of strokes used, or both. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
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21. A method for recognizing a hand-drawn shape, comprising:
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receiving from a user, a hand-drawn ink input representing a diagram, flow chart, or both; performing container recognition for identifying a plurality of containers within the ink input; performing connector recognition for identifying at least one connector within the ink input for connecting the plurality of containers, wherein the identifying of the connector includes identifying a skeleton stroke, an arrowhead stroke, or both, by breaking the connector into pieces at cusps, which are points of high curvature within the connector; and grouping the plurality of containers with the connector by automatically adjusting one or more properties of at least one of the plurality of containers, the connector, or both, such that the plurality of containers and the connector are considered joined, thus allowing the user to create the diagram, flow chart, or both without concern for a stroke input order, a number of strokes used, or both. - View Dependent Claims (22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44)
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45. A method for recognizing a hand-drawn shape, comprising:
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receiving a hand-drawn ink input; performing container recognition for each container within the ink input, the container recognition comprising at least one of performing ellipse/circle recognition or performing polygon recognition, wherein the performing ellipse/circle recognition comprises determining a minimum bounding rectangle around strokes of the container and scaling the strokes to make the minimum bounding rectangle become a square, and wherein the performing polygon recognition comprises determining a maximal inscribed polygon within a convex hull around strokes of the container; and performing connector recognition for each connector within the ink input.
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Specification