Project Ink Analysis

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What is Project Ink Analysis

Project Ink Analysis provides cloud APIs for understanding digital ink content. In addition to simply recognizing the words written by a user, it also provides information about the structure of the content, letting you know where the paragraphs, lines, and individual words are and how they relate to each other.

Project Ink Analysis capabilities have graduated to Ink Recognizer Cognitive Service Preview (opens in new tab) as part of Azure Cognitive Services (opens in new tab).

Please visit the Ink Recognizer page (opens in new tab) to learn more.

How it works

The pen is an incredibly powerful and personal tool that allows people to express themselves in ways no other device can. In recent years, hardware advancements have brought this into the digital world with new devices that can quickly render beautiful ink, letting users create content beyond the traditional confines of the typed word. However, allowing users to create content is only one half of the equation. To truly go beyond the experience offered by traditional pen and paper, we must be able to understand what the user has created, which is where Project Ink Analysis comes in.

Project Ink Analysis provides cloud APIs for understanding digital ink content. In addition to simply recognizing the words written by a user, it also provides information about the structure of the content, letting you know where the paragraphs, lines, and individual words are and how they relate to each other. It even understands handwriting written at an angle! This can enable scenarios such as beautifying the content by normalizing its alignment and spacing while retaining the content as ink or after converting to text. In addition, it allows for shape recognition, along with providing information about how to beautify these shapes (for example turning a user’s not-so-perfect rectangle into a rectangle with 90-degree angles while maintaining the original size).

Whether you want to convert a user’s ink, recognize its content to enable searching within it, or beautify the document structure or drawings, Project Ink Analysis provides you the capabilities you need.

Shape Recognition

Use Project Ink Analysis to recognize common shapes.

Handwriting Recognition

Project Ink Analysis recognizes handwriting in 67 languages.

Layout Analysis

Project Ink Analysis provides grouping and content structure information so you can beautify a user’s writing, in this case by left-aligning the list items.