Lipi Core Toolkit 1.1

Overview

The Core Toolkit provides a set of components which can be used for the construction, evaluation and packaging of handwritten shape recognizers for isolated shapes such as handwritten gestures and characters.

New in this release

• A number of bugs have been fixed and minor enhancements have been made in this release.
• The class "ShapeRecognizer" has been renamed as "ShapeRecMethod" to remove ambiguity 
• Support for "dynamic" projects with variable number of shapes has been added. This is used by LipiIDE 1.0.
• The standalone Data Collection Tool has been moved out of the Core Toolkit into its own release as part of Tools.

Architecture

Supported Platforms

LipiTk 1.1 can be installed on any of the following mentioned platforms:

• Windows XP Professional
• Windows 2000 Professional edition
• Red hat Enterprise Linux Edition 3.0
• GNU Linux 2.6.9.22
• GNU Linux (Ubuntu) 2.6.14.6

System Requirements

Disk Requirements

LipiTk 1.1 packages for Windows and Linux, both are of size 1.5MB, and require 6MB of space after extraction. Building the package requires 40MB of free space.

Software Requirements

Windows

• Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 with SP6 ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/)
• Cabarc sdk (Required for Packaging only) ( http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310618)
• Perl 5.0 or above ( http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/ )

Linux

• GCC 3.3.3 ( http://gcc.gnu.org/)
• tar
• Perl 5.0 or above ( http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/ )

Components

• Lipi Engine
• Generic Data Structure Library
• Preprocessing Library
• Recognition Methods
• Shape Recognition Methods
• Word Recognition Methods
• Utility Classes
• Scripts

Lipi Engine

Main shape and word recognition interface for client applications. Given the project and profile name, Lipi engine performs following actions:

• Loads the DLL of the shape recognizer specified in profile config file.
• Creates and returns the instance of shape recognizer.

Using the instance returned by Lipi engine, applications can interact with the recognizer for training and testing of the algorithm.

Generic Data Structure Library

Generic data structure library defines the classes used to store the digital ink.

Preprocessing

The generic preprocessing module provides implementations of commonly used shape/character preprocessing operations. Lipitk provides following preprocessing operations. All of the operations have configuration options that can be varied using corresponding properties captured in a configuration file.

Recognition Methods

Shape Recognition Methods

Word Recognition Methods

Utility Classes

The utility classes include various infrastructure classes which provide simple utility functions to other modules.These include

• Classes to read/write UNIPEN ink files.
• Classes to read the key-value pairs defined in Lipitk config files.
• Tokenizer class to split a string on the delimiter passed.
• Class to provide logging facility.

Scripts

Implementation Details

Enhancements & Bugs Fixed

Code Enhancements

Recognizers

• Euclidean pre-filter added to the DTW classifier.
• The Boxfield recognizer enhanced to give a 'blank space' output when there is no ink in a logical segment.

PreProcessing

• Multiple normalization functions merged into one. The functionality of -normalizeSize<1-5> merged into one function normalizeSize
• Relative confidence normalization schemes added for PCA and DTW modules, hence the confidence will be in range 0-1

Pre-built recognizers : numerals

• Added shape ID to Unicode mapping for numerals project.

Scripts

• The functionality of build.pl merged into package.pl. All the hard coded variables defined in build.pl have been moved to a config file release.cfg

Known Issues

• On Windows platforms, if the STL’s string data type is used in a client application and passed by reference to a DLL function, the application crashes when the string variable goes out of scope. This is the known defect in Microsoft’s STL library. 
  
  For details see: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;813810
  
  Workaround
  For the detailed list of issues and fixes refer :
  
  • http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;813810
  • http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html
  
   
• The file path specified in list files for training or testing, can not contain spaces. The runshaperec.exe reports an error, and training or testing fails.
  
  Workaround
  Do not use directory or files names with spaces in them, or (for Windows platforms) use the DOS path instead (e.g. for C:\program files, use “C:\progra~1”).

Backward Compatibility

Lipi core-toolkit version 1.1 is not backward compatible with version 1.0 released earlier.

Documents

• User Manual
• Reference Manual

Previous Releases

• Lipi core toolkit 1.0

Contributors