Tracking and retrieval of pen tip positions for an intelligent camera pen

This paper presents a method of recovering digital ink for an intelligent camera pen, which is characterized by the functions that (1) it works on ordinary paper and (2) if an electronic document is printed on the paper the recovered digital ink is associated with the document. Two technologies called paper fingerprint and document image retrieval are integrated for realizing the above functions. The key of the integration is the introduction of image mosaicing and fast retrieval of previously seen fingerprints based on hashing of SURF local features. From the experimental results of 50 handwritings, we have confirmed that the proposed method is effective to recover and locate the digital ink from the handwriting on a physical paper.