Handwritten sentence recognition

We present a system for reading handwritten sentences and paragraphs. The system´s main components are preprocessing, feature extraction and recognition. In contrast to other systems, whole lines of text are the basic units for the recognizer. Thus the difficult problem of segmenting a line of text into individual words can be avoided. Another novel feature of the system is the incorporation of a statistical language model into the recognizer. Experiments on the database described previously by the authors (1999) have shown that a recognition rate on the word level of 79.5% and 60.05% for small (776 words) and larger (7719 words) vocabularies can be reached. These figures increase to 84.3% and 67.32% if the top ten choices are taken into account