Handwriting Trajectory Recovery via Autoregressive Ordered Stroke Instance Prediction

Abstract

Handwriting trajectory recovery aims to infer the dynamic writing process hidden behind a static handwritten image. Since offline handwriting preserves only the final spatial ink pattern, temporal information such as stroke order, writing direction, and pen-tip motion is lost, making recovery inherently ambiguous. Existing learning-based methods often directly predict the complete character trajectory without explicitly exploiting the stroke-level organization of handwriting. We argue that recovering the writing process should follow the writing process itself. Accordingly, we propose a two-stage framework that first recovers ordered stroke instances and then reconstructs continuous within-stroke motion. The first stage integrates stroke extraction and stroke-order recovery through autoregressive ordered stroke prediction, while direction-related structural cues further support within-stroke trajectory generation. Experiments on Chinese handwriting show that the proposed ordered prediction is more effective than post-hoc stroke ordering. Even without trajectory simplification, our full-point model achieves numerically better results than those reported by all compared baselines, while a controlled analysis shows that trajectory sampling density substantially affects measured recovery performance. Additional experiments demonstrate generalization to unseen Chinese character categories and cross-language extensibility to English and Tamil handwriting.