SolveIt: An Application for Automated Recognition and Processing of Handwritten Mathematical Equations

Solving mathematical equations is an integral part of most, if not all forms of scientific studies. Researchers usually go through an arduous process of learning the nuances and syntactic complexities of a mathematical tool in order to solve or process mathematical equations. In this paper, we present a mobile application that can process an image of a handwritten mathematical equation captured using the device's camera, recognise the equation, form the corresponding string that can be parsed by a computer algebraic system and display all possible solutions. We aim to make the whole experience of experimenting with equations very user friendly and to remove the hassle of learning a mathematical tool just for mathematical experimentation. We propose a novel machine learning approach to recognise handwritten mathematical symbols achieving a 99.2% cross validation percentage accuracy on the kaggle math symbol dataset with reduced symbols. The application covers useful features like simultaneous equation solving, graph plotting and simple arithmetic computations from images. Overall it is a very user friendly equation solver that can leverage the power of existing powerful math packages.