8. A memory medium comprising program instructions for generating patterns for use in online character recognition, wherein the program instructions are executable to: perform one or more pre-processing operations on a character sample; perform one or more feature extraction operations on the character sample, wherein the one or more feature extraction operations produce a feature vector for the character sample, wherein said performing the one or more feature extraction operations utilizes a Gabor filter, wherein in performing the one or more feature extraction operations, the program instructions are executable to: extract directional features based on the direction of the character sample's points; generate directional pattern images based on the directional features; filter the directional pattern images using a Gabor filter; and form the feature vector based on the filtered directional pattern images; perform statistical training to generate patterns based on the feature vector of the character sample; store the patterns in a memory, wherein the patterns are configured to be used to recognize handwritten characters.
8. A memory medium comprising program instructions for generating patterns for use in online character recognition, wherein the program instructions are executable to: perform one or more pre-processing operations on a character sample; perform one or more feature extraction operations on the character sample, wherein the one or more feature extraction operations produce a feature vector for the character sample, wherein said performing the one or more feature extraction operations utilizes a Gabor filter, wherein in performing the one or more feature extraction operations, the program instructions are executable to: extract directional features based on the direction of the character sample's points; generate directional pattern images based on the directional features; filter the directional pattern images using a Gabor filter; and form the feature vector based on the filtered directional pattern images; perform statistical training to generate patterns based on the feature vector of the character sample; store the patterns in a memory, wherein the patterns are configured to be used to recognize handwritten characters. 9. The memory medium of claim 8 , wherein the one or more pre-processing operations comprise adding imaginary strokes and adding imaginary points.