Online chemical structure recognition processes temporal sequences of pen strokes rather than static images, enabling real-time interpretation on tablets and touch devices. This sub-problem differs from hand-drawn image recognition in that the system has access to stroke order, timing, and velocity, providing richer signal for disambiguation. The notes here cover symbol-level classifiers (HMM and SVM-HMM approaches from Zhang et al., SVM with elastic matching from Tang et al.) and expression-level systems that parse full chemical formulas from stroke input (Yang et al.’s structural analysis, Wang et al.’s hierarchical grammar, Chang et al.’s unified framework for inorganic and organic expressions, and ChemInk’s joint CRF model).

YearPaperKey Idea
2008On-line Handwritten Chemical Expression RecognitionTwo-level recognition system for handwritten chemical formulas
2008Recognition of On-line Handwritten Chemical ExpressionsTwo-level algorithm for on-line handwritten chemical expression recognition
2009Unified Framework for Handwritten Chemical ExpressionsUnified statistical framework for inorganic and organic expressions
2009Online Handwritten Chemical Formula Structure AnalysisThree-level grammatical framework (formula, molecule, text)
2009HMM-based Online Recognition of Chemical SymbolsHMM-based method using 11-dimensional directional features
2010SVM-HMM Online Classifier for Chemical SymbolsDouble-stage SVM-HMM architecture for chemical symbol classification
2011ChemInk: Real-Time Recognition for Chemical DrawingsSketch recognition system combining CRF with chemical grammar
2013Handwritten Chemical Symbol Recognition Using SVMsHybrid SVM recognition system for handwritten chemical symbols