A Primary Study on a Data-Embedding Pen

Abstract

A new pen device called data-embedding pen is proposed, which can embed digital data into a handwriting trajectory as a small ink dot sequence printed along the trajectory. The produced handwriting patterns convey not only usual human-readable information by the handwriting trajectory but also machine-readable information by the ink dots and therefore have a potential for a universal man-machine interface. In this paper, after discussing hardware and application of the data-embedding pen, component technologies such as extraction and order estimation of embedded ink dots from hand-writing images and error correction, are detailed with experimental results.