What is Leszynski inShape?

Leszynski inShape is a Software Development Kit that supports shape recognition, symbol recognition, storing, and querying of ink strokes.  The Leszynski inShape recognition engine includes a set of class libraries that provide developers with the means to store, recognize, and retrieve arbitrarily complex shapes, drawn by the user in digital ink.  inShape is similar in nature to the handwriting recognizers that are part of the Tablet PC SDK, but it is a completely separate architecture.

The inShape approach is particularly powerful because it doesn't use vectors and points exclusively, but rather uses:

• descriptive properties of shapes;

• a perceptive model of similarity; and

• a partial matching mechanism.

This approach allows inShape to recall and rank complex patterns from and to idealized ones.

inShape utilizes contextual information to facilitate recognition.  One type of contextual information is the domain of symbols (defined by industry, workflow, or other logical grouping) to match against when recognizing.  Shape definitions for a specific domain are contained within a 'shape guide'.

As a simple example, consider the following markup in meeting notes written by a lawyer at a contract review:

The attorney has used both an emotive symbol (sad face) and a legal symbol (shorthand for 'contract') in these notes.  Microsoft's handwriting recognizers are not familiar with either of these symbols, but the symbols are contained in two different inShape shape guide libraries (one for emotive symbols and one for legal symbols).  Using inShape, this note-taking application can recognize and convert the handwriting shown, as well as the symbols, into identifiable textual information.

Downloading Leszynski inShape

Note:  This is Preview Edition software, designed to demonstrate a technology under development.  Leszynski Group makes no representations or warranties about its suitability for any particular task.  This toolkit may not have been tested on the Tablet PC hardware that you install it on.  This Preview Edition is not supported by Leszynski Group and we will not answer support questions about it.

Click here to download, and select Save from the dialog.  Extract the files onto your PC and run the setup.  Leszynski inShape will be installed and inShape documentation will be placed on your Windows Start menu.  Please read the Release Notes after setup has completed.

Experiment and enjoy.  Send feature requests or problem reports to Info at Leszynski dot Com (spam-inoculated — please convert this to a proper e-mail address).