CloudWrite - Handwriting Recognition on the Cloud

Instructions: Use your mouse or your stylus/finger (if you have a computer equipped with a touch screen) to write in the canvas region of the screen. When finishing writing, press the "Reco" button to recognize your handwriting input. A list of recognition candidates will be displayed on top of the canvas region. If you want to use this service on your own website/device or in a native application, please read the paragraphs below. This web page has been tested on major browsers such as FireFox 2/3, IE 6/7/8, Safari 3/4, Opera 9/10 and major OSes such as Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD.

CloudWrite is a hobby-project to investigate the idea of "handwriting/gesture recognition on the cloud". The front-end (ink capture, result display etc) is implemented in JavaScript (using VML, SVG or the Canvas tag depending on browsers) and the handwriting recognition engine is implemented "on the cloud". CloudWrite will be used to explore the idea of handwriting recognition as a service and crowdsource handwriting data collection/labeling.

CloudWrite supports recognition of simplified Chinese characters, numeric characters and upper/lower case English characters only at this moment. The recognition engine is stroke order independent and can handle cursive writing styles and broken strokes. Support for traditional Chinese, Japanese will be added soon.

Note: If you prefer a GUI application, please try the Python GUI client in source code format. This python client supports major OSes such Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD etc. It also demonstrates how to interact with the backend handwriting recognition service on the cloud from a native application, please feel free to look at the included source code in Python.

Questions, Suggestions or Bug Reports: please send them to cloudwrite [at] gmail [dot] com, thank you.