Eigen-deformations for elastic matching based handwritten character recognition

Deformations in handwritten characters have category-dependent tendencies. In this paper, the estimation and the utilization of such tendencies called eigen-deformations are investigated for the better performance of elastic matching based handwritten character recognition. The eigen-deformations are estimated by the principal component analysis of actual deformations automatically collected by the elastic matching. From experimental results it was shown that typical deformations of each category can be extracted as the eigen-deformations. It was also shown that the recognition performance can be improved significantly by using the eigen-deformations for the detection of overfitting, which is the main cause of the misrecognition in the elastic matching based recognition methods.     

Parallel compact integration in handwritten Chinese character recognition

In this paper, a new parallel compact integration scheme based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks is proposed to solve handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) problems. The idea of metasynthesis is applied to HCCR, and compact MLP network classifier is defined. Human intelligence and computer capabilities are combined together effectively through a procedure of two-step supervised learning. Compared with previous integration schemes, this scheme is characterized with parallel compact structure and better performance. It provides a promising way for applying MLP to large vocabulary classification.     

Real-time arabic handwritten character recognition

This paper considers the development of a real-time Arabic handwritten character recognition system. The shape of an Arabic character depends on its position in a given word. The system assumes that characters result from a reliable segmentation stage, thus, the position of the character is known a priori. Thus, four different sets of character shapes have been independently considered. Each set is further divided into four subsets depending on the number of strokes in the character. The system has been heavily tested and the average recognition rate has been found to be 99.6% where most of the misrecognized characters were actually written with little care. Thus, the system can be reliably used for the recognition of on-line handwritten characters entered via a graphic tablet.     

Learning stochastic edit distance: Application in handwritten character recognition

Many pattern recognition algorithms are based on the nearest-neighbour search and use the well-known edit distance, for which the primitive edit costs are usually fixed in advance. In this article, we aim at learning an unbiased stochastic edit distance in the form of a finite-state transducer from a corpus of (input, output) pairs of strings. Contrary to the other standard methods, which generally use the Expectation Maximisation algorithm, our algorithm learns a transducer independently on the marginal probability distribution of the input strings. Such an unbiased way to proceed requires to optimise the parameters of a conditional transducer instead of a joint one. We apply our new model in the context of handwritten digit recognition. We show, carrying out a large series of experiments, that it always outperforms the standard edit distance.     

A new benchmark on the recognition of handwritten Bangla and Farsi numeral characters

The recognition of Indian and Arabic handwriting is drawing increasing attention in recent years. To test the promise of existing handwritten numeral recognition methods and provide new benchmarks for future research, this paper presents some results of handwritten Bangla and Farsi numeral recognition on binary and gray-scale images. For recognition on gray-scale images, we propose a process with proper image pre-processing and feature extraction. In experiments on three databases, ISI Bangla numerals, CENPARMI Farsi numerals, and IFHCDB Farsi numerals, we have achieved very high accuracies using various recognition methods. The highest test accuracies on the three databases are 99.40%, 99.16%, and 99.73%, respectively. We justified the benefit of recognition on gray-scale images against binary images, compared some implementation choices of gradient direction feature extraction, some advanced normalization and classification methods.     

Zoning methods for handwritten character recognition: A survey

This paper presents a survey on zoning methods for handwritten character recognition. Through the analysis of the relevant literature in the field, the most valuable zoning methods are presented in terms of both topologies and membership functions. Throughout the paper, diverse zoning topologies are presented based on both static and adaptive approaches. Concerning static approaches, uniform and non-uniform zoning strategies are discussed. When adaptive zonings are considered, manual and automatic strategies for optimal zoning design are illustrated as well as the most appropriate zoning representation techniques. In addition, the role of membership functions for zoning-based classification is highlighted and the diverse approaches to membership function selection are presented. Concerning global membership functions, the paper introduces order-based approaches as well as fuzzy approaches using border-based and ranked-based fuzzy membership values. Concerning local membership functions, the recent parameter-based approaches are described, in which the optimal membership-function is selected for each zone of the zoning method. Finally, a comparative analysis on the performance of zoning methods is presented and the most interesting approaches are focused on in terms of topology design and membership function selection. A list of selected references is provided as a useful tool for interested researchers working in the field.     

High accuracy handwritten Chinese character recognition using LDA-based compound distances

To improve the accuracy of handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR), we propose linear discriminant analysis (LDA)-based compound distances for discriminating similar characters. The LDA-based method is an extension of previous compound Mahalanobis function (CMF), which calculates a complementary distance on a one-dimensional subspace (discriminant vector) for discriminating two classes and combines this complementary distance with a baseline quadratic classifier. We use LDA to estimate the discriminant vector for better discriminability and show that under restrictive assumptions, the CMF is a special case of our LDA-based method. Further improvements can be obtained when the discriminant vector is estimated from higher-dimensional feature spaces. We evaluated the methods in experiments on the ETL9B and CASIA databases using the modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) as baseline classifier. The results demonstrate the superiority of LDA-based method over the CMF and the superiority of discriminant vector learning from high-dimensional feature spaces. Compared to the MQDF, the proposed method reduces the error rates by factors of over 26%.     

Performance evaluation of pattern classifiers for handwritten character recognition

This paper describes a performance evaluation study in which some efficient classifiers are tested in handwritten digit recognition. The evaluated classifiers include a statistical classifier (modified quadratic discriminant function, MQDF), three neural classifiers, and an LVQ (learning vector quantization) classifier. They are efficient in that high accuracies can be achieved at moderate memory space and computation cost. The performance is measured in terms of classification accuracy, sensitivity to training sample size, ambiguity rejection, and outlier resistance. The outlier resistance of neural classifiers is enhanced by training with synthesized outlier data. The classifiers are tested on a large data set extracted from NIST SD19. As results, the test accuracies of the evaluated classifiers are comparable to or higher than those of the nearest neighbor (1-NN) rule and regularized discriminant analysis (RDA). It is shown that neural classifiers are more susceptible to small sample size than MQDF, although they yield higher accuracies on large sample size. As a neural classifier, the polynomial classifier (PC) gives the highest accuracy and performs best in ambiguity rejection. On the other hand, MQDF is superior in outlier rejection even though it is not trained with outlier data. The results indicate that pattern classifiers have complementary advantages and they should be appropriately combined to achieve higher performance. Received: July 18, 2001 / Accepted: September 28, 2001     

A novel stroke-based feature extraction for handwritten Chinese character recognition

A stroke-based approach to extract skeletons and structural features for handwritten Chinese character recognition is proposed. We first determine stroke directions based on the directional run-length information of binary character patterns. According to the stroke directions and their adjacent relationships, we split strokes into stroke and fork segments, and then extract the skeletons of the stroke segments called skeleton segments. After all skeleton segments are extracted, fork segments are processed to find the fork points and fork degrees. Skeleton segments that touch a fork segment are connected at the fork point, and all connected skeleton segments form the character skeleton. According to the extracted skeletons and fork points, we can extract primitive strokes and stroke direction maps for recognition. A simple classifier based on the stroke direction map is presented to recognize regular and rotated characters to verify the ability of the proposed feature extraction for handwritten Chinese character recognition. Several experiments are carried out, and the experimental results show that the proposed approach can easily and effectively extract skeletons and structural features, and works well for handwritten Chinese character recognition.     

Genetic engineering of hierarchical fuzzy regional representations for handwritten character recognition

This paper presents a genetic programming based approach for optimizing the feature extraction step of a handwritten character recognizer. This recognizer uses a simple multilayer perceptron as a classifier and operates on a hierarchical feature space of orientation, curvature, and center of mass primitives. The nodes of the hierarchy represent rectangular sub-regions of their parent node, the tree root corresponding to the character's bounding box. Within each sub-region, a variable number of fuzzy features are extracted. Genetic programming is used to simultaneously learn the best hierarchy and the best combination of fuzzy features. Moreover, the fuzzy features are not predetermined, they are inferred from the evolution process which runs a two-objective selection operator. The first objective maximizes the recognition rate, and the second minimizes the feature space size. Results on Unipen data show that, using this approach, robust representations could be obtained that out-performed comparable human designed hierarchical fuzzy regional representations.     

A classifier for Bangla handwritten numeral recognition

This paper presents a novel pattern classification approach - a kernel and Bayesian discriminant based classifier which utilizes the distribution characteristics of the samples in each class. A kernel combined with Bayesian discriminant in the subspace spanned by the eigenvectors which are associated with the smaller eigenvalues in each class is adopted as the classification criterion. To solve the problem of the matrix inverse, the smaller eigenvalues are substituted by a small threshold which is decided by minimizing the training error in a given database. Application of the proposed classifier to the issue of handwritten numeral recognition demonstrates that it is promising in practical applications.     

Corpus-based HIT-MW database for offline recognition of general-purpose Chinese handwritten text

A Chinese handwriting database named HIT-MW is presented to facilitate the offline Chinese handwritten text recognition. Both the writers and the texts for handcopying are carefully sampled with a systematic scheme. To collect naturally written handwriting, forms are distributed by postal mail or middleman instead of face to face. The current version of HIT-MW includes 853 forms and 186,444 characters that are produced under an unconstrained condition without preprinted character boxes. The statistics show that the database has an excellent representation of the real handwriting. Many new applications concerning real handwriting recognition can be supported by the database.     

Combining additive input noise annealing and pattern transformations for improved handwritten character recognition

Two problems that burden the learning process of Artificial Neural Networks with Back Propagation are the need of building a full and representative learning data set, and the avoidance of stalling in local minima. Both problems seem to be closely related when working with the handwritten digits contained in the MNIST dataset. Using a modest sized ANN, the proposed combination of input data transformations enables the achievement of a test error as low as 0.43%, which is up to standard compared to other more complex neural architectures like Convolutional or Deep Neural Networks.     

Pseudo two-dimensional shape normalization methods for handwritten Chinese character recognition

The nonlinear normalization (NLN) method based on line density equalization is popularly used in handwritten Chinese character recognition. To overcome the insufficient shape restoration capability of one-dimensional NLN, a pseudo two-dimensional NLN (P2DNLN) method has been proposed and has yielded higher recognition accuracy. The P2DNLN method, however, is very computationally expensive because of the line density blurring of each row/column. In this paper, we propose a new pseudo 2D normalization method using line density projection interpolation (LDPI), which partitions the line density map into soft strips and generate 2D coordinate mapping function by interpolating the 1D coordinate functions that are obtained by equalizing the line density projections of these strips. The LDPI method adds little computational overhead to one-dimensional NLN yet performs comparably well with P2DNLN. We also apply this strategy to extending other normalization methods, including line density projection fitting, centroid-boundary alignment, moment, and bi-moment methods. The latter three methods are directly based on character image instead of line density map. Their 2D extensions provide real-time computation and high recognition accuracy, and are potentially applicable to gray-scale images and online trajectories.     

基于归一化背景方向特征的脱机手写汉字识别

对4方向背景方向特征进行了改进,提出了8方向背景特征描述方法。与4方向背景方向特征描述方法相比,改进后的特征描述方法可以从0°、45°、90°、135°、180°、225°、270°、315°共8个方向来对汉字图像进行考察,从而进一步提高描述的精度。此外,为了消除笔划粗细的影响,还对背景方向特征进行了归一化处理。实验结果表明改进后的归一化8方向背景方向特征具有更高的识别精度。     

An overview of character recognition methodologies

This work presents an overview of character recognition methodologies that have evolved in this century. At first the scanning devices that are used in character recognition will be explained, then some points will be stressed on the major research works that have made a great impact in character recognition. From a methodological point of view we will present the different steps that have been employed in OCR. And finally the most important industrial character recognisers will be covered along with the character data bases that are used in testing the various algorithms.     

A new linguistic decoding method for online handwritten Chinese character recognition

This paper presents a new linguistic decoding method for online hadwritten Chinese character recognition.The method employs a hybrid language model which combines N-gram and linguistic rules by rule quantification technique,The linguistic decoding algorithm consists of three stages:word lattice construction,the optimal sentence hypothesis search and self-adaptive learning mechanism.The technique has been applied to palmtop computer‘s online handwritten chinese character recognition.Samples containing millions of characters were used to test the acter recognition,Samples containing millions of characters were used to test the linguistic decoder.In the open experiment,accuracy rate up to 92% is acieved.and the error rate is reduced by 68%.     

手写混合字符集识别的多特征多级分类器设计

针对常用的银行汉字和阿拉伯数字混合字符集的识别,提出了依据不同的分类要求，分别选取不同的分类特征，并采用先聚类再用多层感知器(MLP)神经网络分类的多级分类器进行识别的设计方法。实验结果表明，该方法用于手写体混合字符集的识别是行之有效的。     

Handwritten character recognition through two-stage foreground sub-sampling

In this paper, we present a methodology for off-line handwritten character recognition. The proposed methodology relies on a new feature extraction technique based on recursive subdivisions of the character image so that the resulting sub-images at each iteration have balanced (approximately equal) numbers of foreground pixels, as far as this is possible. Feature extraction is followed by a two-stage classification scheme based on the level of granularity of the feature extraction method. Classes with high values in the confusion matrix are merged at a certain level and for each group of merged classes, granularity features from the level that best distinguishes them are employed. Two handwritten character databases (CEDAR and CIL) as well as two handwritten digit databases (MNIST and CEDAR) were used in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The recognition result achieved, in comparison to the ones reported in the literature, is the highest for the well-known CEDAR Character Database (94.73%) and among the best for the MNIST Database (99.03%)