UNIPEN appetizers: data and software

UNIPEN is an international project for the collection of on-line handwriting data and benchmarking, in which a large number of universities and companies take place. The project had a closed stage, in which the about 40 donators wanted to perform training and benchmark tests. After this stage, the data now are available from the International Unipen Foundation. The UNIPEN data format is gaining in popularity. Even if you are not involved in the official UNIPEN benchmarking process, you may consider starting to use this format for on-line handwriting data, like many others already did. Although not particularly condensed, the format is in legible ASCII, and very flexible (gzip will do a good job).

Several companies and universities provided UNIPEN on-line handwriting samples. There are a number of screen dumps from the browser Upview, which is a Unix/X11 program written in C. The images should give you an idea of the type of data which is being collected:

New screen dumps of UNIPEN data with Upview, showing PAGE, PARAGRAPH, LINE, WORD, CHARACTER and STROKE levels

Old screen dumps of UNIPEN data (Upview/Uplib)

UNIPEN FTP Site

The UNIPEN Examples and Software site at NICI, The Netherlands

The NICI/UNIPEN FTP site contains:

The current UNIPEN format definition
UNIPEN Data format examples
uptools3
Uptools3 refers to a software distribution of UNIPEN browsers and libraries. It is the follow-up of Uptools2.1.
- We do not aim at DOS compatibility anymore.
- Win'95 is not supported. An experienced C programmer can do it, however in two weeks, using GNU-WIN. We have a cookbook for this port ( schomaker@computer.org). Any volunteers?
- upsiglib
  A library on top of uplib, providing C-routines for extracting signals from UNIPEN ascii files. This was anticipated in Unipen Scrawl, Issue 4. Upsiglib does not yet contain all possible signal types (equidistant time, equidistant space, pixels) but it is a start. If you have some signal processing functions and are willing to add them to upsiglib, please do so and contact us. We are anxious to hear about your experiences and we are willing to add your code to our libraries.
- upview
  The X11-based UNIPEN browser upview has several interactive options, formerly only selectable via the command line, as well as some new graphics options. Upview will be supported in the future as it is the fastest way to quickly visualize a UNIPEN file. However, new developments will also be based on Tcl/Tk (see below).
- upworks
  In the uptools3 release, a totally new tool using Tcl/Tk and X11 is contained, called upworks. It provides a user-interface for scrolling through UNIPEN .SEGMENTS and editing them. It also allows highlighting sub-hierarchies in a .SEGMENT, like the characters in a word.
- Demos.
  There are now 10 sample sources showing how to use the library routines provided by uplib, upsiglib and uphierarchy.
- Tcl/Tk interfaces.
  Demos showing how to load 'uptools' as a shared library in your Tcl/Tk applications. See some examples of screen dumps here.
Getting Binaries
Getting Sources
UNIPEN software tools directory

X11/Sun browser in Lisp (browse.l))

A UNIPEN file parser (syntax checker) (in AWK)

XCSTK Another X11 tool for UNIPEN files (from the research group of Colin Higgins)

The UNIPEN toolkit upTools 3

At NICI we are currently working very hard on UNIPEN toolkit version V3.0. Some features of this next release are:

a fully integrated ink widget written in C and callable from Tcl/Tk
the possibility of viewing several hierarchy levels at the same time in different windows
some basic .SEGMENT manipulation (adjust and add segments)
the displaying of signal time series, smoothing of the coordinates etc., including cursor control and inspection of numerical values

Below is a screendump of a window in upworks, which is the main application in the uptools3 package

UNIPEN and Kanji

There is an increased interest in the recognition of on-line Asian handwriting script types. However, the coding (or rather, the visualisation) of, e.g., Kanji, is still difficult in Western laboratories. Thus, although many researchers may in principle be interested in developing recognition algorithms for on-line Asian handwriting styles, the lack of visualisation tools frustrates such an interest. To partly solve this problem, and in order to raise your interest, we have put a collection op Kanji GIF images on the WWW, in a Kanji dictionary which is based on Jim Breen's KANJIDIC. In the near future, we may expect more and more software which is based on Unicode, and which allows for visualization of the non-ASCII characters represented by the standard.