Visual similarity of pen gestures

Paper
Long Jr, A. Chris, et al. "Visual similarity of pen gestures." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2000.
Publication Link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332458

Summary

This research tries to measure similarity between pen/sketch gestures as perceived by human beings. With the ability to measure similarity, the authors hypothesis that the latter will serve as a good input for feature sets that quantify gesture characteristics. These features, they claim, will better differentiate between features in a way that can be captured computationally.

Discussion

Pros

The idea sounds quite novel.
They performed two experiments that were able to validate claims through multiple differing observations.
The method is a simplistic approach that seems to be effective for capturing differentiators that were otherwise not so intuitive (example: the aspect vs. log(aspect) observation).

Cons.

The paper was not easy to read or follow. 
They do not do a good job of plainly expressing exactly what they did and what their results were. It felt like pulling a tooth to be honest. But it was fairly good research notwithstanding.