Windowed Bernoulli Mixture HMMs for Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are now widely used in off-line handwriting recognition and, in particular, in Arabic handwritten word recognition. In contrast to the conventional approach, based on Gaussian mixture HMMs, we have recently proposed to directly fed columns of raw, binary pixels into Bernoulli mixture HMMs. In this work, column bit vectors are extended by means of a sliding window of adequate width to better capture image context at each horizontal position of the word image. Using these windowed Bernoulli mixture HMMs, very good results are reported on the well-known IfN/ENIT database of Arabic handwritten Tunisian town names.