The NicIcon Database of Handwritten Icons for Crisis Management

The NicIcon Database of Handwritten Icons for Crisis Management

The NicIcon collection comprises simultaneously acquired online pen trajectories and offline scans of 14 classes of icons that are important in the domain of crisis management and incident response systems. The icons were designed such that (i) they have a visual resemblance to the objects they represent or correspond to well known corresponding symbols (so that they are easy to learn by the users), and (ii) are distinguishable by the computer. Furthermore, each participant was requested to write the so-called "London Letter", a well-known piece of text which is used to collect handwriting for forensic document examination purposes.

The NicIcon database contains 24,441 hand drawn icons that are available both offline (as scans of pen-on-paper drawn icons) and online (recorded as time series coordinates on a digitizing tablet).

In total, 32 participants, all volunteers, participated inthe experiment. They were all Dutch students in the age range of 19 to 30 (μ = 21.63, σ = 2.35), of which 29 were male, and 3 were female.

A detailed description of the data and the collection can be found in the publication "The NicIcon Database of Handwritten Icons for Crisis Management" by Ralph Niels, Don Willems and Louis Vuurpijl. This paper can for example be found at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228664054_The_NicIcon_Database_of_Handwritten_Icons_for_Crisis_Management/citations

.DATA_INFO      The NicIcon collection contains data acquired from 33
                students. The collection contains so-called "iconic
                gestures", representing symbolic drawings of situations and
                events to be marked on so-called "interactive maps".
                Gesture classes are inspired by symbolic representations of,
                e.g., cars, persons, police, floods, accidents, etcetera.
                In total 14 classes of gestures were collected.
        Furthermore, each participant was requested to write the so-
                called "London Letter", a well-known piece of text which is
                used to collect handwriting for forensic document examination
                purposes.

        The data is segmented and labeled in pages and icons.
                The texts remain unsegmented, but segmentation in
                line/word/character is on our agenda.

.SETUP          A Wacom Intuos2 A4 oversize tablet was used as digital
                input device. This tablet was set at a resolution of
                100 dpi, a reading height of 10 mm, and a maximum data
                rate of 100 pps. The device distinguishes 1024 pressure
                levels. The tablet was connected to a computer running
                Microsoft Windows XP. Specially developed software was
                used to record spatial coordinates and
                pressure coordinates. An A4-sized sheet of 160 grams/$m^2$
                paper was clamped to the tablet. A Wacom writing pen,
                with a green Lamy M21 pen tip
                (see www.lamy.com/eng/b2c/Refills and inks/M 21), was
                used by the participants to draw the data.

                Each sheet of paper was scanned using a HP Scanjet 7400C
                flatbed scanner at 300dpi resolution in 24bits color. Both
                online and offline data are available for download from
                http://unipen.nici.ru.nl/NicIcon

                Each paper sheet contained seven rows of five columns,
                resulting in 35 drawing areas. For each row, 5 instances of
                the same class were drawn at a certain size. Each of the 33
                participants had to fill in 22 of such paper sheets,
                resulting in 770 icon gestures per participant.

.LEXICON_INFO   The 14 gesture classes are:
                    Accident     - a triangle with exclamation mark inside
                    Bomb         - a circle with fuse
                    Car          - side-view of a car
                    Casualty     - a circle with an 'X' cross below it
                    Electricity  - a "lightning" arrow with head downwards
                    Flood        - two horizontal curly lines
                    FireBrigade  - a triangle with character 'F' inside
                    Fire         - a gestures with flames
                    Gas          - three vertical curly lines
                    Injury       - a person laying horizontal
                    Paramedics   - a square with a '+' cross inside
                    Person       - a vertical (standing) human figure
                    Police       - a diamond with a 'P' inside
                    RoadBlock    - a circle with a '-' sign inside

                 Each label associated with an icon contains 6 fields:
                       <www>-<pp>-<r>-<c>-<l>-<size> , where:
                           www   =   writer identification (000-034)
                           pp    =   page number (00-23)
                           r     =   row (0-6)
                           c     =   column (0-4)
                           l     =   classlabel
                           s     =   size
                 For example, the icon labeled as "000-19-5-4-flood-M"
                 was written by writer "000" on page "19", at row=5 and col=4,
                 the label is "flood" and the size is "medium". Note that the
                 first two sheets were used for practising and contain icons
                 labeled with size='A' (any). The other size categories are
                 'S' (small), 'M' (medium), and 'L' (large).

                 The text from the London letter reads:

                        Our Londen business is good, but Vienna an Berlin are
                        quiet. Mr. D. Lloyd has gone to Switzerland and I hope
                        for good news. He will be there for a week at 1496
                        Zermatt Street and then goes to Turin and Rome and
                        will join Colonel Parry and arrive at Athens, Greece,
                        November 27th or December 2nd. Letters there should be
                        addressed King James Blvd. 3580. We expect Charles E.
                        Fuller Tuesday. Dr. L. Mc Quaid and Robert Unger,
                        Esq., left on the 'Y. X.' Express tonight.

.PAD           Wacom Intuos2 A4 oversize

.COMMENT Below, the settings used during data collection. So, resolution was at
         100 dpi and sampling rate at 100Hz. Pressure is given in tablet units.
         Both X and Y coordinates are given in micrometer (transformed from the
         original tablet coordinates).

.COMMENT xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  TABLET TEMPORAL RESOLUTION
.POINTS_PER_SECOND 100

.COMMENT xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  TABLET SPATIAL RESOLUTION = 100dpi, but coordinates are in micro-meter
.X_POINTS_PER_MM 1000
.Y_POINTS_PER_MM 1000

.COMMENT xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  actually, pressure is not in gram but in tablet units
  TABLET PRESSURE RESOLUTION = 1024
.POINTS_PER_GRAM   1024