Handwriting recognition

About: Handwriting recognition is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5154 publications have been published within this topic receiving 148736 citations. The topic is also known as: symbol recognition & reading handwritten characters.

Word spotting for historical documents

Abstract: Searching and indexing historical handwritten collections are a very challenging problem. We describe an approach called word spotting which involves grouping word images into clusters of similar words by using image matching to find similarity. By annotating “interesting” clusters, an index that links words to the locations where they occur can be built automatically. Image similarities computed using a number of different techniques including dynamic time warping are compared. The word similarities are then used for clustering using both K-means and agglomerative clustering techniques. It is shown in a subset of the George Washington collection that such a word spotting technique can outperform a Hidden Markov Model word-based recognition technique in terms of word error rates.

Handwritten Numeral Databases of Indian Scripts and Multistage Recognition of Mixed Numerals

Abstract: This article primarily concerns the problem of isolated handwritten numeral recognition of major Indian scripts. The principal contributions presented here are (a) pioneering development of two databases for handwritten numerals of two most popular Indian scripts, (b) a multistage cascaded recognition scheme using wavelet based multiresolution representations and multilayer perceptron classifiers and (c) application of (b) for the recognition of mixed handwritten numerals of three Indian scripts Devanagari, Bangla and English. The present databases include respectively 22,556 and 23,392 handwritten isolated numeral samples of Devanagari and Bangla collected from real-life situations and these can be made available free of cost to researchers of other academic Institutions. In the proposed scheme, a numeral is subjected to three multilayer perceptron classifiers corresponding to three coarse-to-fine resolution levels in a cascaded manner. If rejection occurred even at the highest resolution, another multilayer perceptron is used as the final attempt to recognize the input numeral by combining the outputs of three classifiers of the previous stages. This scheme has been extended to the situation when the script of a document is not known a priori or the numerals written on a document belong to different scripts. Handwritten numerals in mixed scripts are frequently found in Indian postal mails and table-form documents.

Smart Sight: a tourist assistant system

Abstract: In this paper, we present our efforts towards developing an intelligent tourist system The system is equipped with a unique combination of sensors and software The hardware includes two computers, a GPS receiver, a lapel microphone plus an earphone, a video camera and a head-mounted display This combination includes a multimodal interface to take advantage of speech and gesture input to provide assistance for a tourist The software supports natural language processing, speech recognition, machine translation, handwriting recognition and multimodal fusion A vision module is trained to locate and read written language, is able to adapt to to new environments, and is able to interpret intentions offered by the user such as a spoken clarification or pointing gesture We illustrate the applications of the system using two examples

Improving Offline Handwritten Text Recognition with Hybrid HMM/ANN Models

Abstract: This paper proposes the use of hybrid Hidden Markov Model (HMM)/Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models for recognizing unconstrained offline handwritten texts. The structural part of the optical models has been modeled with Markov chains, and a Multilayer Perceptron is used to estimate the emission probabilities. This paper also presents new techniques to remove slope and slant from handwritten text and to normalize the size of text images with supervised learning methods. Slope correction and size normalization are achieved by classifying local extrema of text contours with Multilayer Perceptrons. Slant is also removed in a nonuniform way by using Artificial Neural Networks. Experiments have been conducted on offline handwritten text lines from the IAM database, and the recognition rates achieved, in comparison to the ones reported in the literature, are among the best for the same task.