Title :
Writer adaptation for handwritten word recognition using hidden Markov models
Author_Institution :
Service de Recherche Tech. de la Poste, Nantes, France
Abstract :
This paper describes a method for improving handwritten word recognition by implicitly recognizing the writing style. Writing style is taken here to cover several types of distinctions between word shapes: cursive script vs. handprinted words, run-on vs. discrete words, differences in skew angle values, stability of lower and upper extensions of letters, presence or absence of loops in naturally looped letters. This method is applied in the general framework of hidden Markov models (HMM). The proposed method consists in the use of a set of models rather than of a unique model for each word. Each model in the set is associated to a certain class of writers, As a consequence, writing style is automatically and implicitly detected during recognition. But the main contribution of the method is a better estimation of the recognition score, i.e. the probability of generating the word with the HMM
Keywords :
optical character recognition; HMM; cursive script; handprinted words; handwritten word recognition; hidden Markov models; looped letters; skew angle values; writer adaptation; writing style recognition; Cities and towns; Handwriting recognition; Hidden Markov models; Image coding; Postal services; Shape; Stability; Testing; Vocabulary; Writing;
Conference_Titel :
Pattern Recognition, 1994. Vol. 2 - Conference B: Computer Vision & Image Processing., Proceedings of the 12th IAPR International. Conference on
Conference_Location :
Jerusalem
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-6270-0
DOI :
10.1109/ICPR.1994.576890