Grafomotorick© obt­e (GD) vraznÄ ovlivuj­ kvalitu ivota koln­m vÄkem poÄ­naj­c, kde se vyv­jej­ grafomotorick© schopnosti, a do dchodov©ho vÄku. VÄasn diagnza tÄchto obt­­ a terapeutick zsah maj­ velk vznam k jejich zlepen­. Vzhledem k tomu, e GD souvis­ z v­cermi symptomy v oblasti kinematiky, zkladn­ kinematick© parametry jako rychlost, zrychlen­ a vih prokzaly efektivn­ kvantizaci tÄchto symptom. Objektivn­ vpoÄetn­ syst©m podpory rozhodovn­ pro identifikaci a vyeten­ GD vak nen­ dostupn. A proto je hlavn­m c­lem m© disertaÄn­ prce vzkum pokroÄil© metody parametrizace online p­sma pro analzu GD se speciln­m zamÄen­m na vyuit­ metod zlomkov©ho kalkulu. Tato prce je prvn­, kter experimentuje s vyuit­m derivac­ neceloÄ­seln©ho du (FD) pro analzu GD pomoc­ online p­sma z­skan©ho od pacient s Parkinsonovou nemoc­ a u dÄt­ koln­ho vÄku. Byla navrena a evaluovna nov metoda parametrizace online p­sma zaloena na FD vyuit­m Grnwald-Letnikova p­stupu. Bylo dokzno, e navren metoda vznamnÄ zlepuje diskriminaÄn­ s­lu a deskriptivn­ schopnosti v oblasti Parkinsonick© dysgrafie. StejnÄ tak metoda pozitivnÄ ovlivnila i nejmodernÄj­ techniky v oblasti analzy GD u dÄt­ koln­ho vÄku. Vyvinut parametrizace byla optimalizovna s ohledem na vpoÄetn­ nroÄnost (a o 80 %) a tak© na vyladÄn­ du FD. Ke konci prce byly porovnny v­cer© p­stupy vpoÄtu FD, jmenovitÄ Riemann-Liouvillv, Caputv spoleÄnÄ z Grnwald-Letnikovm p­stupem za Äelem identifikace tÄch nejvhodnÄj­ch pro jednotliv© oblasti analzy GD.

Nous présentons dans cette thèse un nouveau paradigme pour caractériser la maladie d’Alzheimer à travers l’écriture manuscrite acquise sur tablette graphique. L’état de l’art est dominé par des méthodes qui supposent un comportement unique ou homogène au sein de chaque profil cognitif. Ces travaux exploitent des paramètres cinématiques globaux, sur lesquels ils appliquent des tests statistiques ou des algorithmes de classification pour discriminer les différents profils cognitifs (les patients Alzheimer, les troubles cognitifs légers (« Mild Cognitive impairment » : MCI) et les sujets Contrôle (HC)). Notre travail aborde ces deux limites de la littérature de la façon suivante : premièrement au lieu de considérer un comportement homogène au sein de chaque profil cognitif ou classe (HC, MCI, ES-AD : « Early-Stage Alzheimer Disease »), nous nous sommes affranchis de cette hypothèse (ou contrainte) forte de la littérature. Nous considérons qu’il peut y avoir plusieurs comportements au sein de chaque profil cognitif. Ainsi, nous proposons un apprentissage semi-supervisé pour trouver des groupes homogènes de sujets et analysons l’information contenue dans ces clusters ou groupes sur les profils cognitifs. Deuxièmement, au lieu d’exploiter les paramètres cinématiques globaux (ex : vitesse moyenne, pression moyenne, etc.), nous avons défini deux paramétrisations ou codages : une paramétrisation semi-globale, puis locale en modélisant la dynamique complète de chaque paramètre. L’un de nos résultats importants met en évidence deux clusters majeurs qui sont découverts, l’un dominé par les sujets HC et MCI et l’autre par les MCI et ES-AD, révélant ainsi que les patients atteints de MCI ont une motricité fine qui est proche soit des sujets HC, soit des patients ES-AD. Notre travail montre également que la vitesse prise localement regroupe un ensemble riche des caractéristiques telles que la taille, l’inclinaison, la fluidité et la régularité, et révèle comment ces paramètres spatiotemporels peuvent conjointement caractériser les profils cognitifs. / We present, in this thesis, a novel paradigm for assessing Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing impairment of handwriting (HW) on tablets, a challenging problem that is still in its infancy. The state of the art is dominated by methods that assume a unique behavioral trend for each cognitive profile, and that extract global kinematic parameters, assessed by standard statistical tests or classification models, for discriminating the neuropathological disorders (Alzheimer’s (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)) from Healthy Controls (HC). Our work tackles these two major limitations as follows. First, instead of considering a unique behavioral pattern for each cognitive profile, we relax this heavy constraint by allowing the emergence of multimodal behavioral patterns. We achieve this by performing semi-supervised learning to uncover homogeneous clusters of subjects, and then we analyze how much information these clusters carry on the cognitive profiles. Second, instead of relying on global kinematic parameters, mostly consisting of their average, we refine the encoding either by a semi-global parameterization, or by modeling the full dynamics of each parameter, harnessing thereby the rich temporal information inherently characterizing online HW. Thanks to our modeling, we obtain new findings that are the first of their kind on this research field. A striking finding is revealed: two major clusters are unveiled, one dominated by HC and MCI subjects, and one by MCI and ES-AD, thus revealing that MCI patients have fine motor skills leaning towards either HC’s or ES-AD’s. This thesis introduces also a new finding from HW trajectories that uncovers a rich set of features simultaneously like the full velocity profile, size and slant, fluidity, and shakiness, and reveals, in a naturally explainable way, how these HW features conjointly characterize, with fine and subtle details, the cognitive profiles.

In this thesis, we address some of the challenges involved in developing a robust writer-independent, lexicon-free system to recognize online Tamil words. Tamil, being a Dravidian language, is morphologically rich and also agglutinative and thus does not have a finite lexicon. For example, a single verb root can easily lead to hundreds of words after morphological changes and agglutination. Further, adoption of a lexicon-free recognition approach can be applied to form-filling applications, wherein the lexicon can become cumbersome (if not impossible) to capture all possible names. Under such circumstances, one must necessarily explore the possibility of segmenting a Tamil word to its individual symbols. Modern day Tamil alphabet comprises 23 consonants and 11 vowels forming a total combination of 313 characters/aksharas. A minimal set of 155 distinct symbols have been derived to recognize these characters. A corpus of isolated Tamil symbols (IWFHR database) is used for deriving the various statistics proposed in this work. To address the challenges of segmentation and recognition (the primary focus of the thesis), Tamil words are collected using a custom application running on a tablet PC. A set of 10000 words (comprising 53246 symbols) have been collected from high school students and used for the experiments in this thesis. We refer to this database as the ‘MILE word database’. In the first part of the work, a feedback based word segmentation mechanism has been proposed. Initially, the Tamil word is segmented based on a bounding box overlap criterion. This dominant overlap criterion segmentation (DOCS) generates a set of candidate stroke groups. Thereafter, attention is paid to certain attributes from the resulting stroke groups for detecting any possible splits or under-segmentations. By relying on feedbacks provided by a priori knowledge of attributes such as number of dominant points and inter-stroke displacements the recognition label and likelihood of the primary SVM classifier linguistic knowledge on the detected stroke groups, a decision is taken to correct it or not. Accordingly, we call the proposed segmentation as ‘attention feedback segmentation’ (AFS). Across the words in the MILE word database, a segmentation rate of 99.7% is achieved at symbol level with AFS. The high segmentation rate (with feedback) in turn improves the symbol recognition rate of the primary SVM classifier from 83.9% (with DOCS alone) to 88.4%. For addressing the problem of segmentation, the SVM classifier fed with the x-y trace of the normalized and resampled online stroke groups is quite effective. However, the performance of the classifier is not robust to effectively distinguish between many sets of similar looking symbols. In order to improve the symbol recognition performance, we explore two approaches, namely reevaluation strategies and language models. The reevaluation techniques, in particular, resolve the ambiguities in base consonants, pure consonants and vowel modifiers to a considerable extent. For the frequently confused sets (derived from the confusion matrix), a dynamic time warping (DTW) approach is proposed to automatically extract their discriminative regions. Dedicated to each confusion set, novel localized cues are derived from the discriminative region for their disambiguation. The proposed features are quite promising in improving the symbol recognition performance of the confusion sets. Comparative experimental analysis of these features with x-y coordinates are performed for judging their discriminative power. The resolving of confusions is accomplished with expert networks, comprising discriminative region extractor, feature extractor and SVM. The proposed techniques improve the symbol recognition rate by 3.5% (from 88.4% to 91.9%) on the MILE word database over the primary SVM classifier. In the final part of the thesis, we integrate linguistic knowledge (derived from a text corpus) in the primary recognition system. The biclass, bigram and unigram language models at symbol level are compared in terms of recognition performance. Amongst the three models, the bigram model is shown to give the highest recognition accuracy. A class reduction approach for recognition is adopted by incorporating the language bigram model at the akshara level. Lastly, a judicious combination of reevaluation techniques with language models is proposed in this work. Overall, an improvement of up to 4.7% (from 88.4% to 93.1%) in symbol level accuracy is achieved. The writer-independent and lexicon-free segmentation-recognition approach developed in this thesis for online handwritten Tamil word recognition is promising. The best performance of 93.1% (achieved at symbol level) is comparable to the highest reported accuracy in the literature for Tamil symbols. However, the latter one is on a database of isolated symbols (IWFHR competition test dataset), whereas our accuracy is on a database of 10000 words and thus, a product of segmentation and classifier accuracies. The recognition performance obtained may be enhanced further by experimenting on and choosing the best set of features and classifiers. Also, the word recognition performance can be very significantly improved by using a lexicon. However, these are not the issues addressed by the thesis. We hope that the lexicon-free experiments reported in this work will serve as a benchmark for future efforts.

Grafomotorické dovednosti (GA) představují skupinu psychomotorických procesů, které se zapojují během kreslení a psaní. GA jsou nutnou prerekvizitou pro zvládání základních školních schopností, konkrétně psaní. Děti v první a druhé třídě mohou mít potíže s prováděním jednoduchých grafomotorických úkolů (GD) a později ve třetí a čtvrté třídě také se samotným psaním (HD). Narušení procesů spojených se psaním je obecně nazýváno jako vývojová dysgrafie (DD). Prevalence DD v České republice se pohybuje kolem 3–5 %. V současné době je DD hodnocena subjektivně týmem psychologů a speciálních pedagogů. V praxi stále chybí objektivní měřicí nástroj, který by umožňoval hodnocení GD a HD. Z tohoto důvodu se tato disertační práce zabývá identifikováním symptomů spojených s grafomotorickou neobratností u dětí školního věku a vývojem nových parametrů, které je budou kvantifikovat. Byl vytvořen komplexní GA protokol (36 úloh), který představuje prostředí, ve kterém se mohou projevit různé symptomy spojené s GD a HD. K těmto symptomům bylo přiřazeno 76 kvantifikujících parametrů. Dále byla navrhnuta nová škála grafomotorických obtíží (GDRS) založena na automatizovaném zpracování online píma. Nakonec byla prezentována a otestována nová sada parametrizačních technik založených na Tunable Q Factor Wavelet Transform (TQWT). Parametry TQWT dokážou kvantifikovat grafomotorickou obratnost nebo nedostatečný projev v jemné motorice. GDRS přestavuje nový, moderní a objektivní měřící nástroj, který doposud chyběl jak v České republice, tak v zahraničí. Použití škály by pomohlo modernizovat jak diagnostiku DD, tak reedukační/remediační proces. Další výzkum by tento nástroj mohl adaptovat i do jiných jazyků. Navíc, tato metodologie může být použita a optimalizována pro diagnostiku dalších nemocí a poruch, které ovlivňují grafomotorické dovednosti, například pro autismus, poruchu pozornosti s hyperaktivitou (ADHD) nebo dyspraxii (DCD).