Automated Bilingual Handwriting Evaluation for Early Childhood Education: A Multi-Metric Structural Analysis

Abstract

Traditional handwriting assessment in early childhood education relies on subjective teacher evaluation and becomes particularly challenging in bilingual Sri Lankan curricula involving both English and Sinhala. This paper introduces a multi-metric handwriting quality scoring pipeline for automated evaluation of preschool handwritten letters for children aged 4-6. The proposed system integrates contour-based segmentation, language-specific convolutional neural network (CNN)-based recognition (achieving 86.73% test accuracy on EMNIST for English and 99.04% on a custom Sinhala dataset), and an eight-metric structural analysis framework. The framework combines structural similarity (SSIM), topology preservation, shape invariants, proportion analysis, stroke continuity, alignment, pixel Intersection over Union (IoU), and a 9 × 9 grid-based spatial comparison. The weighted scoring approach shows strong agreement with teacher assessments, demonstrating the reliability of the proposed system. Designed for Sri Lankan early education contexts, the approach provides a scalable, interpretable, and objective solution, addressing the gap in automated Sinhala handwriting assessment tools.