An Efficient Hidden Markov Model for Offline Handwritten Numeral Recognition

Traditionally, the performance of ocr algorithms and systems is based on the recognition of isolated characters. When a system classifies an individual character, its output is typically a character label or a reject marker that corresponds to an unrecognized character. By comparing output labels with the correct labels, the number of correct recognition, substitution errors misrecognized characters, and rejects unrecognized characters are determined. Nowadays, although recognition of printed isolated characters is performed with high accuracy, recognition of handwritten characters still remains an open problem in the research arena. The ability to identify machine printed characters in an automated or a semi automated manner has obvious applications in numerous fields. Since creating an algorithm with a one hundred percent correct recognition rate is quite probably impossible in our world of noise and different font styles, it is important to design character recognition algorithms with these failures in mind so that when mistakes are inevitably made, they will at least be understandable and predictable to the person working with theComment: 6pages, 5 figure

Unsupervised Adaptation for Synthetic-to-Real Handwritten Word Recognition

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is still a challenging problem because it must deal with two important difficulties: the variability among writing styles, and the scarcity of labelled data. To alleviate such problems, synthetic data generation and data augmentation are typically used to train HTR systems. However, training with such data produces encouraging but still inaccurate transcriptions in real words. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised writer adaptation approach that is able to automatically adjust a generic handwritten word recognizer, fully trained with synthetic fonts, towards a new incoming writer. We have experimentally validated our proposal using five different datasets, covering several challenges (i) the document source: modern and historic samples, which may involve paper degradation problems; (ii) different handwriting styles: single and multiple writer collections; and (iii) language, which involves different character combinations. Across these challenging collections, we show that our system is able to maintain its performance, thus, it provides a practical and generic approach to deal with new document collections without requiring any expensive and tedious manual annotation step.Comment: Accepted to WACV 202