inkGround is a new benchmark for evaluating how well Vision‑Language Models can recover the fine‑grained stroke trajectories of cursive handwriting from camera‑captured page images. It contains 537 full‑page images with 18.7k words and 163k strokes, paired with pseudo‑trajectory references generated by an offline‑to‑online model and verified by humans. The benchmark casts the task as text‑conditioned point grounding, scoring models on trajectory fidelity, readability, and style similarity, and compares both open‑source and closed‑source VLMs, showing that closed‑source models like Gemini‑3.1‑Pro perform best.
By Sidra Hanif
arXiv:2607. 26736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Digital pens are commonly used to write on digital devices, providing the handwriting trace and enhancing human-computer interation.
By Florent Imbert, Romain Tavenard, Yann Soullard, Eric Anquetil
InkSight is a system that converts offline handwritten notes captured in photos into digital ink, enabling seamless transition from pen-and-paper to editable, vectorized formats. Unlike prior methods that rely heavily on geometric image properties, InkSight integrates reading and writing priors, allowing it to learn from limited paired data. The model successfully derenders handwritten text in diverse photos and even simple sketches, with human evaluations showing 87% of outputs as valid tracings and 67% resembling human pen trajectories.
By Blagoj Mitrevski, Arina Rak, Julian Schnitzler, Chengkun Li, Andrii Maksai, Jesse Berent, Claudiu Musat
arXiv:2607. 26733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Handwriting with digital pens is a common way to facilitate human-computer interaction through the use of Online Handwriting (OH) trajectory reconstruction.
By Wassim Swaileh, Florent Imbert, Yann Soullard, Romain Tavenard, Eric Anquetil
arXiv:2609.17565v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Online handwriting recognition systems typically represent pen trajectories through fixed-length Euclidean shape descriptors that capture the spatial o...
By Hassan Ugail, Newton Howard
arXiv:2603. 16883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inertial measurement unit-based online handwriting recognition enables the recognition of input signals collected across different writing surfaces but remains challenged by uneven character distributions and inter-writer variability.
By Jindong Li, Dario Zanca, Vincent Christlein, Tim Hamann, Jens Barth, Peter K\"ampf, Bj\"orn Eskofier
Digital pens are commonly used to write on digital devices, providing the handwriting trace and enhancing human-computer interation. This study focuses on a digital pen equipped with kinematic sensors, allowing users to write on any surface while simultaneously preserving a digital trajectory of handwriting.
arXiv:2609.37195v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems have become an indispensable tool for the digitization of historical documents. Not only do they cut down ti...
By Eric Ayllon, Abel Gandia, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza
OmniHandwritingOCR is a diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and OCR systems on handwritten text and mathematical expression recognition. It comprises 77.57K labeled images across six subtasks and twelve subsets, including a difficulty‑stratified multi‑line formula corpus that tests robustness to increasing structural complexity. The benchmark reveals that current systems perform poorly on complex multi‑line formulas, exhibit variable rankings across languages and formula settings, and sometimes hallucinate corrections that are not visually supported.
By Zinuo Guo, Min Zhang, Bo Jiang
The paper investigates self‑supervised pretraining for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and finds that pixel‑reconstruction methods outperform contrastive methods, a contrast to natural‑image classification. The authors argue that discriminative information for HTR is concentrated in high‑variance pixel directions, and they test six SSL methods across six handwriting benchmarks in five languages, showing that pixel‑grounded approaches achieve the lowest character error rates and are more label‑efficient. When combined with a pretrained LLM decoder, a frozen pixel‑grounded encoder rivals fully fine‑tuned supervised baselines, underscoring the importance of aligning representations with high‑variance pixel subspaces.
By Carlos Garrido-Munoz, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza
The paper introduces a Hybrid Deep Learning (HDL) architecture that combines Auto-Learned Features (ALF) and Human-Engineered Features (HEF) for handwriting verification. ALF is extracted using a Two Channel Convolutional Neural Network (TC-CNN) or a Two Channel Autoencoder (TC-AE), while HEF is obtained via Gradient Structural Concavity (GSC) or Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Experiments on 150,000 pairs of the word "AND" from 1,500 writers show that the HDL model using AE-GSC achieves 99.7% accuracy on a seen writer dataset and 92.16% on a shuffled writer dataset, outperforming CEDAR-FOX, and AE-SIFT performs comparably on unseen writers.
By Seyed Mohammad Abuzar Hashemi, Mihir Chauhan, Jun Chu, Sargur Srihari
arXiv:2609.12702v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Capturing the digital trace of handwriting usually requires a specific stylus and a compatible substrate, be it a capacitive touchscreen, an Electr...
By Florent Imbert, Yann Soullard, Eric Anquetil, Tanja Harbaum, Alexey Serdyuk, Fabian Kress, Tim Hamann, Peter Kampf