Search for segment similarity inside strokes

Question

i am looking for a technique or a known method to search a part of similar segments in a handwritten text.

its a kind of image retrieval, but rather than searching for an entire word or character, i want to search similar parts of strokes given a pattern as input image.

the figure below illustrate this process, where the red segments are input images and red rectangles represent part of text similar to the input.

by "similar", i mean "approximately", not exact matching

thanks in advance

Answer 1

I believe Shape Context can be helpful for your task. You can read more about it here.
Shape context descriptor allows you to robustly describe a local shape. Finding two shape-context descriptors that are nearly identical strongly suggests that the underlying text pattern are quite similar.

You can find Matlab implementation in the project's home page.