# Robust and Efficient Writer-Independent IMU-Based Handwriting Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20954/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [xLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04517/) (2024)
- [Fast Multi-language LSTM-based Online Handwriting Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10525/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Online Sequence-to-Sequence and Character-based Handwriting Recognition from IMU-Enhanced Pens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07036/) (2022)
- [Towards Writing Style Adaptation in Handwriting Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06318/) (2023)
- [Towards an IMU-based Pen Online Handwriting Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12434/) (2021)
- [Digitizing Handwriting with a Sensor Pen: A Writer-Independent Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03704/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Handwriting recognition (HWR) using inertial measurement unit (IMU) data remains challenging due to variations in writing styles and the limited availability of datasets. Previous approaches often struggle with handwriting from unseen writers, making writer-independent (WI) recognition a crucial yet difficult problem. This paper presents a model designed to improve WI HWR on IMU data, using a CNN encoder and BiLSTM-based decoder. Our approach demonstrates strong robustness to unseen handwriting styles, outperforming existing methods on the WI splits of both the public OnHW dataset and our word-based dataset, achieving character error rates (CERs) of 7.37% and 9.44%, and word error rates (WERs) of 15.12% and 32.17%, respectively. Robustness evaluation shows that our model maintains superior performance across different age groups, with knowledge learned from one group generalizing better to another compared to other approaches. Evaluation on our sentence-based dataset further demonstrates the potential for recognizing full sentences. Through comprehensive ablation studies, we show that our design choices achieve a strong balance between performance and efficiency. These findings support the development of more adaptable and scalable HWR systems for real-world applications.