InkTracer - Closing the gap between analog and digital handwriting to enable new products

"Writing has a very long history. It began as simple pictographs drawn on a rock, which were then combined to represent ideas and developed into more abstract symbols. Just like our writing today, early symbols were used to store information and communicate it to others. We may take it for granted, but the written word has shaped our modern civilization and we will have a natural affinity with pen and paper for a long time to come. Taking down a phone message, sketching ideas on a notepad, leading a class on a whiteboard, or signing a mortgage - handwriting remains a part of our daily lives. Despite modern technology, important information is still recorded in ink on paper or marker on whiteboard, which is hard to share, easily lost, and difficult to navigate.

Touch screens and digital pens have become commonplace, enabling workflows that include digital ink and handwriting recognition. These advances allow us to write and take notes as we have since childhood, but still benefit from data that can be interpreted by a computer. We can search for text, archive and index our notes, and even go back and cleanly edit the original. These advantages are not available to handwriting on paper or a whiteboard - we can take a photo or make a scan, but computers are unable to interpret the information in a scan of a handwritten document as effectively as they can from digital ink.

In this project Surface Intelligence and Loughborough University will work together to develop a solution that will close the gap between analog and digital handwriting. By employing cutting edge machine learning techniques, we will develop a solution to recover the path of a pen from a picture of the writing. Converting an image of handwritten text to digital ink will allow us to enjoy the benefits of modern workflows without disturbing the advantages we enjoy when using pen and paper or marker and whiteboard.

Surface Intelligence will work in partnership with Wacom to bring this solution to the market. Wacom are world leaders in graphics tablets and digital pens with forward looking cloud services for digital ink. They are very well placed to advise on requirements and to partner with Surface Intelligence to provide a sound commercial proposition and route to market."