Generalized hidden Markov models. II. Application to handwrittenword recognition

For part I see ibid. vol.8, no. 1 (2000). This paper presents an application of the generalized hidden Markov models to handwritten word recognition. The system represents a word image as an ordered list of observation vectors by encoding features computed from each column in the given word image. Word models are formed by concatenating the state chains of the constituent character hidden Markov models. The novel work presented includes the preprocessing, feature extraction, and the application of the generalized hidden Markov models to handwritten word recognition. Methods for training the classical and generalized (fuzzy) models are described. Experiments were performed on a standard data set of handwritten word images obtained from the US Post Office mail stream, which contains real-word samples of different styles and qualities     

A structural and relational approach to handwritten wordrecognition

In this paper, we present a new off-line word recognition system that is able to recognize unconstrained handwritten words using grey-scale images. This is based on structural and relational information in the handwritten word. We use Gabor filters to extract features from the words, and then use an evidence-based approach for word classification. A solution to the Gabor filter parameter estimation problem is given, enabling the Gabor filter to be automatically tuned to the word image properties. We also developed two new methods for correcting the slope of the handwritten words. Our experiments show that the proposed method achieves good recognition rates compared to standard classification methods.     

Recognizing handwritten Arabic words using grapheme segmentation and recurrent neural networks

The Arabic alphabet is used in around 27 languages, including Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, and Jawi. Many researchers have developed systems for recognizing cursive handwritten Arabic words, using both holistic and segmentation-based approaches. This paper introduces a system that achieves high accuracy using efficient segmentation, feature extraction, and recurrent neural network (RNN). We describe a robust rule-based segmentation algorithm that uses special feature points identified in the word skeleton to segment the cursive words into graphemes. We show that careful selection from a wide range of features extracted during and after the segmentation stage produces a feature set that significantly reduces the label error. We demonstrate that using same RNN recognition engine, the segmentation approach with efficient feature extraction gives better results than a holistic approach that extracts features from raw pixels. We evaluated this segmentation approach against an improved version of the holistic system MDLSTM that won the ICDAR 2009 Arabic handwritten word recognition competition. On the IfN/ENIT database of handwritten Arabic words, the segmentation approach reduces the average label error by 18.5 %, the sequence error by 22.3 %, and the execution time by 31 %, relative to MDLSTM. This approach also has the best published accuracies on two IfN/ENIT test sets.     

A lexicon driven approach to handwritten word recognition forreal-time applications

A fast method of handwritten word recognition suitable for real time applications is presented in this paper. Preprocessing, segmentation and feature extraction are implemented using a chain code representation of the word contour. Dynamic matching between characters of a lexicon entry and segment(s) of the input word image is used to rank the lexicon entries in order of best match. Variable duration for each character is defined and used during the matching. Experimental results prove that our approach using the variable duration outperforms the method using fixed duration in terms of both accuracy and speed. Speed of the entire recognition process is about 200 msec on a single SPARC-10 platform and the recognition accuracy is 96.8 percent are achieved for lexicon size of 10, on a database of postal words captured at 212 dpi     

基于多尺度的蒙古文脱机手写识别方法

蒙古文的一大特点是字符无缝连接,因此一个蒙古文单词有多种字符划分方式。根据蒙古文这一特点,该文提出了多尺度蒙古文脱机手写识别方法,即让一个手写蒙古文单词图像对应多种目标序列,用多个目标序列同时约束训练模型,使得模型更加精准地学习手写图像的细节信息和蒙古文构词规则。该文提出了“十二字头”码、变形显现码和字素码3种字符划分方法,且拥有相互包含关系,即“十二字头”码可以分解为变形显现码、变形显现码可以进一步分解为字素码。多尺度模型首先用多层双向长短时记忆网络对序列化手写图像进行处理,之后加入第一层连接时序分类器做“十二字头”码序列的映射,然后是第二层连接时序分类器做变形显现码序列的映射,最后是第三层连接时序分类器做字素码序列的映射。用三个连接时序分类器损失函数的和作为模型的总损失函数。实验结果表明,该模型在公开的蒙古文脱机手写数据集MHW上表现出了最佳性能,在简单的最佳路径解码方式下,测试集Ⅰ上的单词识别准确率为66.22%、测试集Ⅱ上为63.97%。     

Modeling and recognition of cursive words with hidden Markov models

In this paper, a new method for modeling and recognizing cursive words with hidden Markov models (HMM) is presented. In the proposed method, a sequence of thin fixed-width vertical frames are extracted from the image, capturing the local features of the handwriting. By quantizing the feature vectors of each frame, the input word image is represented as a Markov chain of discrete symbols. A handwritten word is regarded as a sequence of characters and optional ligatures. Hence, the ligatures are also explicitly modeled. With this view, an interconnection network of character and ligature HMMs is constructed to model words of indefinite length. This model can ideally describe any form of handwritten words, including discretely spaced words, pure cursive words and unconstrained words of mixed styles. Experiments have been conducted with a standard database to evaluate the performance of the overall scheme. The performance of various search strategies based on the forward and backward score has been compared. Experiments on the use of a preclassifier based on global features show that this approach may be useful for even large-vocabulary recognition tasks.     

Visual word density-based nonlinear shape normalization method for handwritten Chinese character recognition

In handwritten Chinese character recognition, the performance of a system is largely dependent on the character normalization method. In this paper, a visual word density-based nonlinear normalization method is proposed for handwritten Chinese character recognition. The underlying rationality is that the density for each image pixel should be determined by the visual word around this pixel. Visual vocabulary is used for mapping from a visual word to a density value. The mapping vocabulary is learned to maximize the ratio of the between-class variation and the within-class variation. Feature extraction is involved in the optimization stage, hence the proposed normalization method is beneficial for the following feature extraction. Furthermore, the proposed method can be applied to some other image classification problems in which scene character recognition is tried in this paper. Experimental results on one constrained handwriting database (CASIA) and one unconstrained handwriting database (CASIA-HWDB1.1) demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the start-of-the-art methods. Experiments on scene character databases chars74k and ICDAR03-CH show that the proposed method is promising for some image classification problems.     

Feature selection for ensembles applied to handwriting recognition

Feature selection for ensembles has shown to be an effective strategy for ensemble creation due to its ability of producing good subsets of features, which make the classifiers of the ensemble disagree on difficult cases. In this paper we present an ensemble feature selection approach based on a hierarchical multi-objective genetic algorithm. The underpinning paradigm is the “overproduce and choose”. The algorithm operates in two levels. Firstly, it performs feature selection in order to generate a set of classifiers and then it chooses the best team of classifiers. In order to show its robustness, the method is evaluated in two different contexts:supervised and unsupervised feature selection. In the former, we have considered the problem of handwritten digit recognition and used three different feature sets and multi-layer perceptron neural networks as classifiers. In the latter, we took into account the problem of handwritten month word recognition and used three different feature sets and hidden Markov models as classifiers. Experiments and comparisons with classical methods, such as Bagging and Boosting, demonstrated that the proposed methodology brings compelling improvements when classifiers have to work with very low error rates. Comparisons have been done by considering the recognition rates only.     

Handwritten numeral recognition based on simplified structural classification and fuzzy memberships

Previous handwritten numeral recognition algorithms applied structural classification to extract geometric primitives that characterize each image, and then utilized artificial intelligence methods, like neural network or fuzzy memberships, to classify the images. We propose a handwritten numeral recognition methodology based on simplified structural classification, by using a much smaller set of primitive types, and fuzzy memberships. More specifically, based on three kinds of feature points, we first extract five kinds of primitive segments for each image. A fuzzy membership function is then used to estimate the likelihood of these primitives being close to the two vertical boundaries of the image. Finally, a tree-like classifier based on the extracted feature points, primitives and fuzzy memberships is applied to classify the numerals. With our system, handwritten numerals in NIST Special Database 19 are recognized with correct rate between 87.33% and 88.72%.     

脱机手写维吾尔文本图像单词切分

针对脱机手写维吾尔文本行图像中单词切分问题,提出了FCM融合K-means的聚类算法。通过该算法得到单词内距离和单词间距离两种分类。以聚类结果为依据,对文字区域进行合并,得到切分点,再对切分点内的文字进行连通域标注,进行着色处理。以50幅不同的人书写的维吾尔脱机手写文本图像为实验对象,共有536行和4?002个单词,正确切分率达到80.68%。实验结果表明,该方法解决了手写维吾尔文在切分过程中,单词间距离不规律带来的切分困难的问题和一些单词间重叠的问题。同时实现了大篇幅手写文本图像的整体处理。     

Off-line general handwritten word recognition using an approximateBEAM matching algorithm

A recognition system for general isolated off-line handwritten words using an approximate segment-string matching algorithm is described. The fundamental paradigm employed is a character-based segment-then-recognize/match strategy. An additional user supplied contextual information in the form of a lexicon guides a graph search to estimate the most likely word image identity. This system is designed to operate robustly in the presence of document noise, poor handwriting, and lexicon errors. A pre-processing step is initially applied to the image to remove noise artifacts and normalize the handwriting. An oversegmentation approach is used to improve the likelihood of capturing the individual characters embedded in the word. A directed graph is constructed that contains many possible interpretations of the word image, many implausible. The most likely graph path and associated confidence is computed for each lexicon word to produce a final lexicon ranking. Experiments highlighting the characteristics of this algorithm are given     

Farsi/Arabic handwritten digit recognition using quantum neural networks and bag of visual words method

Handwritten digit recognition has long been a challenging problem in the field of optical character recognition and of great importance in industry. This paper develops a new approach for handwritten digit recognition that uses a small number of patterns for training phase. To improve performance of isolated Farsi/Arabic handwritten digit recognition, we use Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) technique to construct images feature vectors. Each visual word is described by Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) method. For learning feature vectors, Quantum Neural Networks (QNN) classifier is used. Experimental results on a very popular Farsi/Arabic handwritten digit dataset (HODA dataset) show that proposed method can achieve the highest recognition rate compared to other state of the arts methods.     

区间模糊相似性度量的离线签名验证

为优化离线手写签名验证,提出了一种基于区间符号表示和模糊相似性度量的高效离线签名验证方法。在特征提取步骤中,从签名图像及其欠采样位图计算一组基于改进局部二值模式（LBP）与灰度共生矩阵（GLCM）相融合的特征。然后获得每个签名类中每个要素的区间值符号数据。为每个人的手写签名类创建由一组间隔值（对应于特征的数量）组成的签名模型。为了验证测试样本,还提出了一种新的模糊相似性度量来计算测试样本签名和相应的区间值符号模型之间的相似度。为了评估所提出的验证方法,使用了不同类型的中文手写签名笔迹图片进行测试与比对,识别率可以达到92.75%。实验结果表明当训练样本的数目是10或更多时,有效提高了识别率,所提出的方法优点在于当向系统添加新类时不需要被重新训练,并在内存使用和计算时间方面与神经网络比较是廉价的。     

Word spotting for historical documents

Searching and indexing historical handwritten collections are a very challenging problem. We describe an approach called word spotting which involves grouping word images into clusters of similar words by using image matching to find similarity. By annotating “interesting” clusters, an index that links words to the locations where they occur can be built automatically. Image similarities computed using a number of different techniques including dynamic time warping are compared. The word similarities are then used for clustering using both K-means and agglomerative clustering techniques. It is shown in a subset of the George Washington collection that such a word spotting technique can outperform a Hidden Markov Model word-based recognition technique in terms of word error rates. An erratum to this article can be found at     

脱机自由手写英文单词的识别

介绍了一个基于隐马尔科夫模型的、采用模糊分割方式的脱机手写英文单词识别系统。该系统由图像预处理、特征提取、基于HMM的训练和识别四个模块组成。图像预处理中包括二值化、平滑去噪、倾斜校正和参考线提取。然后通过宽度不固定的滑动窗提取特征,前两组特征是整体形状和象素分布特征,另外又引入了Sobel梯度特征。HMM模型采用嵌入式的Baum-Welch算法训练,这种训练方式无需分割单词。最后用Viterbi算法识别。对字典中的每个单词,采用字母模型线性连接成单词模型。     

Handwritten Bangla numeral recognition system and its application to postal automation

A recognition system for handwritten Bangla numerals and its application to automatic letter sorting machine for Bangladesh Post is presented. The system consists of preprocessing, feature extraction, recognition and integration. Based on the theories of principal component analysis (PCA), two novel approaches are proposed for recognizing handwritten Bangla numerals. One is the image reconstruction recognition approach, and the other is the direction feature extraction approach combined with PCA and SVM. By examining the handwritten Bangla numeral data captured from real Bangladesh letters, the experimental results show that our proposed approaches are effective. To meet performance requirements of automatic letter sorting machine, we integrate the results of the two proposed approaches with one conventional PCA approach. It has been found that the recognition result achieved by the integrated system is more reliable than that by one method alone. The average recognition rate, error rate and reliability achieved by the integrated system are 95.05%, 0.93% and 99.03%, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that the integrated system also meets speed requirement.