Generating Synthetic Handwritten Mathematical Expressions from a LaTeX Sequence or a MathML Script

Collecting handwritten mathematical expressions (HMEs) generally requires a lot of time and effort for data preparation, data collection, annotation and so on. In this paper, we present a method for generating realistic HMEs in a wide variety of structures and styles from a LaTeX sequence or a MathML script using online isolated symbol patterns. Our method firstly positions all symbols in a symbol relation tree constructed from the input LaTeX or MathML script. Then, it places normalized online symbol patterns into the corresponding locations. A questionnaire-based experiment shows that the synthetic patterns are as clear and natural as the real patterns. Therefore, we can use the generated synthetic HME patterns for research on HME recognition and clustering.