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Offline Recognition of Unconstrained Handwritten Texts Using HMMs and Statistical Language Models

Published: 01 June 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Abstract--This paper presents a system for the offline recognition of large vocabulary unconstrained handwritten texts. The only assumption made about the data is that it is written in English. This allows the application of Statistical Language Models in order to improve the performance of our system. Several experiments have been performed using both single and multiple writer data. Lexica of variable size (from 10,000 to 50,000 words) have been used. The use of language models is shown to improve the accuracy of the system (when the lexicon contains 50,000 words, the error rate is reduced by \sim 50 percent for single writer data and by \sim 25 percent for multiple writer data). Our approach is described in detail and compared with other methods presented in the literature to deal with the same problem. An experimental setup to correctly deal with unconstrained text recognition is proposed.

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cover image IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence  Volume 26, Issue 6
June 2004
150 pages

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IEEE Computer Society

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 June 2004

Author Tags

  1. N\hbox{-}{\rm{grams}}
  2. Nhbox{-}{rm{grams}}
  3. Offline cursive handwriting recognition
  4. continuous density Hidden Markov Models.
  5. statistical language models

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