Word Spotting and Regular Expression Detection in Handwritten Documents

In this paper, we propose a novel system for word spotting and regular expression detection in Handwritten documents. The proposed approach is lexicon-free, i.e., able to spot arbitrary keywords that are not required to be known at the training stage. Furthermore, the proposed system is segmentation-free, i.e., text lines are not required to be segmented into words. The originalities of our approach is twofold. First we propose a new filler model which allows to speed-up the decoding process. Second, we extend the methodology to search for regular expressions. The system has been evaluated on a public handwritten document database used for the 2011 ICDAR handwriting recognition competitions.