Ambiguity reduction in handwriting with ambiguous segmentation and uncertain interpretation

A connected piece of handwritiing can be segmented into letters in many possible ways, and each segment can also be interpreted as one of several possible letters. Each segmentation, and each choice of interpretations for the segments, determines a word. An iterative relaxation algorithm is presented that considerably reduces the number of possible interpretations for the handwriting, while preserving the most likely interpretations.