Ambiguity and constraint in mathematical expression recognition
Erik G. Miller, Paul A. Viola · 1998
The problem of recognizing mathematical expressions differs significantly from the recognition of standard prose. While in prose significant constraints can be put on the interpretation of a character by the characters immediately preceding and following it, few such sim-ple constraints are present in a mathematical expres-sion. In order to make the problem tractable, effective methods of recognizing mathematical expressions will need to put intelligent constraints on the possible in-terpretations. The authors present preliminary results on a system for the recognition of both handwritten and typeset mathematical expressions. While previous systems perform character recognition out of context, the current system maintains ambiguity of the char-acters until context can be used to disambiguate the interpretatiom In addition, the system limits the num-ber of potentially valid interpretations by decomposing the expressions into a sequence of compatible convex regions. The system uses A-star to search for the best possible interpretation of an expression. We provide a new lower bound estimate on the cost to goal that improves performance significantly.