Structural analysis of handwritten mathematical expressions

A method for detecting relations between symbols in handwritten mathematical expressions is presented. Expressions are automatically decomposed into blocks by projections onto x or y axes. The blocks are represented by rectangles surrounding symbols. The authors discuss aligned blocks between which mathematical relations exist. These are categorized as being on the same line, exponents or subscripts. A statistical labeling associates the probability of each relation with each block pair. Final labeling is obtained by propagating the local information using contextual constraints. The search for the optimal labeling is performed on a state-space tree.<<ETX>>