In this paper, a semi-automatic character labeling ('truthing') procedure is presented which uses an initial unsupervised algorithm to estimate the starting stroke and number of strokes per allograph, followed by minimal user interaction to improve the estimates (in this study, a stroke is defined as the trajectory of the pen tip between two consecutive minima in the absolute pen-tip velocity). Such a procedure is very useful since the complete manual labeling of ahndwriting takes in the order of one hour per one-hundred written words. Even without making use of detailed shape information the proposed algorithm already yields a usable segmentation which facilitates the manual labeling process.
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