Recognizing Hand-drawn Glyphs from One Example and Four Lines of Code

The biggest challenge in the development of gesturebased user interfaces is the creation of a gesture recognizer. Existing approaches to support high-level recognition of glyphs require a lot of effort from developers, are error prone, and suffer from low recognition rates. We propose a tool that generates a recognizer for hand-drawn glyphs from one example. Our tool uses the output of a basic shape recognizer as input to the glyph recognition. The recognizer can be integrated into an app by adding only four lines of code. By reducing the development effort required, the approach makes it possible for many touch-interaction apps to take advantage of hand-drawn content. We demonstrate the tools effectiveness with two examples. Furthermore, our within-subject evaluation shows that programmers with no knowledge of gesture recognition can generate a recognizer and integrate it into an app more quickly and easily than manually coding recognition rules, and that the generated recognizer is more accurate than a manually coded one.