Handwriting style classification

This paper describes an independent handwriting style classifier that has been designed to select the best recognizer for a given style of writing. For this purpose a definition of handwriting legibility has been defined and a method implemented that can predict this legibility. The technique consists of two phases. In the feature-extraction phase, a set of 36 features is extracted from the image contour. In the classification phase, two nonparametric classification techniques are applied to the extracted features in order to compare their effectiveness in classifying words into legible, illegible, and middle classes. In the first method, a multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) is used to transform the space of extracted features (36 dimensions) into an optimal discriminant space for a nearest mean based classifier. In the second method, a probabilistic neural network (PNN) based on the Bayes strategy and nonparametric estimation of probability density function is used. The experimental results show that the PNN method gives superior classification results when compared with the MDA method. For the legible, illegible, and middle handwriting the method provides 86.5% (legible/illegible), 65.5% (legible/middle), and 90.5% (middle/illegible) correct classification for two classes. For the three-class legibility classification the rate of correct classification is 67.33% using a PNN classifier.Received: 6 September 2002, Accepted: 19 September 2002, Published online: 6 June 2003