Handwriting recognition by using deep learning to extract meaningful features

[EN] Recent improvements in deep learning techniques show that deep models can extract more meaningful data directly from raw signals than conventional parametrization techniques, making it possible to avoid specific feature extraction in the area of pattern recognition, especially for Computer Vision or Speech tasks. In this work, we directly use raw text line images by feeding them to Convolutional Neural Networks and deep Multilayer Perceptrons for feature extraction in a Handwriting Recognition system. The proposed recognition system, based on Hidden Markov Models that are hybridized with Neural Networks, has been tested with the IAM Database, achieving a considerable improvement.Work partially supported by the Spanish MINECO and FEDER founds under project TIN2017-85854-C4-2-R.Pastor Pellicer, J.; Castro-Bleda, MJ.; España Boquera, S.; Zamora-Martinez, FJ. (2019). Handwriting recognition by using deep learning to extract meaningful features. 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Online Handwriting Recognition using HMM

Basically handwriting recognition can be divided into two parts as Offline handwriting recognition and Online handwriting recognition. Highly accurate output with predefined constraints can be given by Online handwriting recognition system as it is related to size of vocabulary and writer dependency, printed writing style etc. Hidden markov model increases the success rate of online recognition system. Online handwriting recognition gives additional time information which is not present in Offline system. A Markov process is a random prediction process whose future behavior rely only on its present state, does not depend on the past state. Which means it should satisfy the Markov condition. A Hidden markov model (HMM) is a statistical markov model. In HMM model the system being modeled is assumed to be a markov process with hidden states. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) can be viewed as extensions of discrete-state Markov processes. Human-machine interaction can be drastically getting improved as On-line handwriting recognition technology contains that capability. As instead of using keyboard any person can write anything by hand with the help of digital pen or any similar equipment would be more natural. HMM build a effective mathematical models for characterizing the variance both in time and signal space presented in speech signal

ICFHR2014 Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition on tranScriptorium Datasets (HTRtS)

©2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.A contest on Handwritten Text Recognition organised in the context of the ICFHR 2014 conference is described. Two tracks with increased freedom on the use of training data were proposed and three research groups participated in these two tracks. The handwritten images for this contest were drawn from an English data set which is currently being considered in the tranScriptorium project. The the goal of this project is to develop innovative, efficient and cost-effective solutions for the transcription of historical handwritten document images, focusing on four languages: English, Spanish, German and Dutch. For the English language, the so-called “Bentham collection” is being considered in tranScriptorium. It encompasses a large set of manuscripts written by the renowned English philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). A small subset of this collection has been chosen for the present HTR competition. The selected subset has been written by several hands (Bentham himself and his secretaries) and entails significant varibilities and difficulties regarding the quality of text images and writting styles. Training and test data were provided in the form of carefully segmented line images, along with the corresponding transcripts. The three participants achieved very good results, with transcription word error rates ranging from 15.0% down to 8.6%.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Pro-gramme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 600707- tranScriptorium. The authors would like to thank all theTRANSCRIPTORIUMmembers for their collaboration and the entrants for their participation in this contest.Sánchez Peiró, JA.; Romero Gómez, V.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal Ruiz, E. (2014). ICFHR2014 Competition on Handwritten Text Recognition on tranScriptorium Datasets (HTRtS). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICFHR.2014.137

Hybrid hidden Markov models and artificial neural networks for handwritten music recognition in mensural notation

In this paper, we present a hybrid approach using hidden Markov models (HMM) and artificial neural networks to deal with the task of handwritten Music Recognition in mensural notation. Previous works have shown that the task can be addressed with Gaussian density HMMs that can be trained and used in an end-to-end manner, that is, without prior segmentation of the symbols. However, the results achieved using that approach are not sufficiently accurate to be useful in practice. In this work, we hybridize HMMs with deep multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), which lead to remarkable improvements in optical symbol modeling. Moreover, this hybrid architecture maintains important advantages of HMMs such as the ability to properly model variable-length symbol sequences through segmentation-free training, and the simplicity and robustness of combining optical models with N-gram language models, which provide statistical a priori information about regularities in musical symbol concatenation observed in the training data. The results obtained with the proposed hybrid MLP-HMM approach outperform previous works by a wide margin, achieving symbol-level error rates around 26%, as compared with about 40% reported in previous works

Towards robust real-world historical handwriting recognition

In this thesis, we make a bridge from the past to the future by using artificial-intelligence methods for text recognition in a historical Dutch collection of the Natuurkundige Commissie that explored Indonesia (1820-1850). In spite of the successes of systems like 'ChatGPT', reading historical handwriting is still quite challenging for AI. Whereas GPT-like methods work on digital texts, historical manuscripts are only available as an extremely diverse collections of (pixel) images. Despite the great results, current DL methods are very data greedy, time consuming, heavily dependent on the human expert from the humanities for labeling and require machine-learning experts for designing the models. Ideally, the use of deep learning methods should require minimal human effort, have an algorithm observe the evolution of the training process, and avoid inefficient use of the already sparse amount of labeled data. We present several approaches towards dealing with these problems, aiming to improve the robustness of current methods and to improve the autonomy in training. We applied our novel word and line text recognition approaches on nine data sets differing in time period, language, and difficulty: three locally collected historical Latin-based data sets from Naturalis, Leiden; four public Latin-based benchmark data sets for comparability with other approaches; and two Arabic data sets. Using ensemble voting of just five neural networks, a level of accuracy was achieved which required hundreds of neural networks in earlier studies. Moreover, we increased the speed of evaluation of each training epoch without the need of labeled data