Mathieu’s log

My project proposal “Japanese/Chinese handwriting recognition on Maemo” has been accepted for this year’s edition of the Google Summer of Code. Yay ! :-) You can see my original proposal here.

I am very excited about this project because it combines several of my great interests:
- free software
- Japanese and Chinese languages
- embedded

Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the Japanese and Chinese languages, to input characters, users have to use a so-called input-method. They type the pronunciation of the character and select it in a list. However, with literally thousands of characters, it happens, even to native speakers, to be unable to read a character. In this event, the input method cannot be used. Handwriting recognition is a nice answer to that problem especially since Nokia internet tablets feature a touchscreen and a stylus.

Above is a screenshot of tomoe in action under Debian GNU/Linux. The challenge of this project will be to bring tomoe to Maemo with particular focus on good integration into the platform. As you can see, the drawing area is divided into four squares that help draw the character correctly. The stroke numbers are displayed because they are very important for tomoe to find the correct character (roughly, characters have to be drawn from left to right and from top to bottom). You can undo/redo the last stroke. A list of possible candidates is displayed. This list is updated when the search button is pushed or, if the option is enabled, on each stroke. This latter option is useful because this way you can find your character without drawing it completely.

Here is the program timeline:
- May 28: beginning of the project
- July 9: code upload to code.google.com/hosting and mid-term evaluations
- August 20: code upload to code.google.com/hosting and final evaluations

I am very eager to work on this project and especially, I am looking forward to working with Makoto Sugano, my mentor on this project. I would like to thank him for becoming my mentor. I think I will learn a lot from him as well as from the Maemo community. I am also very grateful to Luc Pionchon thanks to whom I got a discounted Nokia N800.

Note: Three other Maemo projects have been selected including a project on Ruby bindings. This project is of particular interest for me because it would allow me to port Fantasdic to Maemo. :-)