Keyword spotting in handwritten documents based on a generic text line HMM and a SVM verification

In this paper, we propose a novel system for keyword spotting in handwritten documents. Our approach proceeds in two steps: first a generic text line HMM provides a simple and flexible tool to localize the keyword and its character boundaries. In the second step, a SVM based verification system estimates and combines the character probabilities to provide keyword confidence scores which are further combined with the HMM score. The system has been evaluated on a public handwritten document database used for the 2011 ICDAR handwriting recognition competitions and shows that the verification stage improves the performance and outperforms some other state-of-the-art approaches.