Evaluation of children cursive handwritten words for e-education

Abstract As part of an innovative e-education project, a digital workbook is being developed to help teach handwriting at school for children aged three to seven. The main objective of this project is to offer an advanced digital writing experience at school by using pen-based tablets. In this paper, an automatic qualitative analysis process of cursive handwriting words is presented. This approach is original because the goal is not to recognise the word that was handwritten by children (it is an explicit instruction) but to design a precise evaluation of the quality of his handwriting production to give them a real-time feedback. The presented method is based on a specific explicit elastic letter spotting segmentation able to deal with the imprecision of the handwriting of young children. This approach is suited to automatically and precisely highlight the difficulties encountered by children (adding or missing letters, incorrect shapes...). The validation of the proposed approach has been done on a dataset collected in French preschools and primary schools from 231 children. Beyond quantitative results, this paper reports the very positive impact of using this digital workbook that allows children to work independently with online and real-time feedbacks.