Editing Handwriting recognition (section)

=== Traditional techniques ===

==== Character extraction ====
Offline character recognition often involves scanning a form or document. This means the individual characters contained in the scanned image will need to be extracted. Tools exist that are capable of performing this step.<ref>[https://sourceforge.net/projects/javaocr/ Java OCR, 5 June 2010]. Retrieved 5 June 2010</ref> However, there are several common imperfections in this step. The most common is when characters that are connected are returned as a single sub-image containing both characters. This causes a major problem in the recognition stage. Yet many algorithms are available that reduce the risk of connected characters.

==== Character recognition ====
After individual characters have been extracted, a recognition engine is used to identify the corresponding computer character. Several different recognition techniques are currently available.

===== Feature extraction =====
[[Feature extraction]] works in a similar fashion to neural network recognizers. However, programmers must manually determine the properties they feel are important. This approach gives the recognizer more control over the properties used in identification. Yet any system using this approach requires substantially more development time than a neural network because the properties are not learned automatically.