title: Handwriting Recognition Application in Android
body: <p>I'm working on a application for handwriting recognition,ie, the user draws their character into the screen,and then that particular alphabet is generated automatically.</p>
  
  <p>The approach I'm taking(after a reading from <a href="http://drdobbs.com/security/184408923?pgno=2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>),is to first train the system. While training, I store the Path(<a href="http://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Path.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">android.graphics.Path</a>) values. Thanks to <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4919740/how-to-serialize-an-object-of-android-graphics-path">this</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8832931/can-i-serialize-the-paths-drawn-on-canvas-for-redrawing-the-paths-on-relaunch-of">this</a> and <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1243181/how-to-store-object-in-sqlite-database">this</a>, I know how to serialize and store the Path values to a database during the training phase.</p>
  
  <p>Now while comparing the values for comparison with what the user has drawn as a character, I can increase the accuracy by calculating the centroid and the number of strokes of every character,to differentiate between cases like <code>b</code> and <code>d</code>.</p>
  
  <p>The problem I'm facing is :</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/jPori.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>The three a's written on the screen are all different, and will all generate a different Path value. How do I compare such characters?</p>
  
  <p>Now,I know there are many such questions on SO regarding handwriting recognition. But since I have already taken up an approach, I don't think those questions would be relevant to me. But if anyone has better and easier solutions to handwriting recognition,can feel free to suggest. :-)</p>