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Extraction of mathematical expressions with OCR would enormously help communication like here.

  1. Is it possible do?

  2. Is there some way easily to write into LaTex without keyboard?

  3. Is there some way to make mathematical writing into Math SE easier?

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I love the "pony" tag... – Mariano Suárez-Alvarez♦ Feb 26 '12 at 21:03
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@hhh Probably few readers will know what you mean by "pony problem". It is not widely used. – Gone Feb 26 '12 at 21:21
As I mentioned on the other question, I find some of this "thinking aloud" a load of pony... – user16299 Feb 26 '12 at 23:02
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So you're posting "wish list" questions on the meta? This seems like a waste of energy and time of all parties involved. At best you should start a thread about all those dreams and get it over with at once. I'm voting to close as NARQ. – Asaf Karagila Feb 26 '12 at 23:03
NARQ $\\\\\\\\\\\\\\$ – user21436 Feb 28 '12 at 10:50
@Bill. I'd agree: 3 uses (all by one poster---guess who?) certainly qualifies as "not widely used." – Rick Decker Oct 1 '12 at 17:59

3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Here's a related discussion on TeX.SE: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1443/what-is-the-status-of-generating-latex-from-handwriting-i-e-ocr

This particular tool called Web Equation does a rather remarkable job for a lot of mathematics expressions. Unfortunately it looks like it may be more intended for interaction with Tablets instead of scanned documents.

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...wow that is interesting, thanks for sharing the info +1. I did not realize there are more people on this problem, cool. – hhh Feb 26 '12 at 23:32
up vote 3 down vote

In general, recognizing handwriting and turning it into text is very hard for computers, and depending on the handwriting nigh impossible. Throwing math symbols into the mix makes this almost certainly unfeasible at this point for any computer, much less for the servers that run math.SE to casually do every time they come across a picture. I'm afraid this really is a pony request (for those who don't know: a request that isn't going to happen, so you might as well ask for a pony too).

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up vote 1 down vote

By this thread suggested here, I was able to found the below details. I have so far investigated the hot European names but the thread also mentions some Japanese research so probably taking some time to really understand the status of this research. The key terms are OCR, cluster-analysis, feature-extraction, feature-selection, image-processing, pre-processingg, decision-making -- Wikipedia article outlining things here and SE threads below.

Rigorous and mostly mathematical

  • Adademic papers outlined here

Practical problems, mostly education -related

Programming biased

  • OCR related info here, here -- relating to things such as OCR engines eg. Tesseract
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