Algorithm to recognise mouse movements

Question

Am wondering if there has been any research/algorthms which specify the amount of deviation of the mouse while recognizing characters like say "?" drawn using the mouse. Something a sort of optical character recognition, but probably a simpler version. Is there some algorithm using which I can say that a question mark drawn by the user is really a question mark and not something else with some amount of accuracy ofcourse. Something like what windows tablet software allows (while writing with the tablet stylus).

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

1. Mouse gestures recognition

Answer 2

Dynamic Time Warping is the basis for one commercially available handwriting recognition system. Basically, it's a way to give you a distance measure from a sequence of input to a stored template. Correctly implemented, for instance basing it on numerical derivaties, it can be scale and position invariant.