Handwritten Bank Check Recognition of Courtesy Amounts

In spite of rapid evolution of electronic techniques, a number of large-scale applications continue to rely on the use of paper as the dominant medium. This is especially true for processing of bank checks. This paper examines the issue of reading the numerical amount field. In the case of checks, the segmentation of unconstrained strings into individual digits is a challenging task because of connected and overlapping digits, broken digits, and digits that are physically connected to pieces of strokes from neighboring digits. The proposed architecture involves four stages: segmentation of the string into individual digits, normalization, recognition of each character using a neural network classifier, and syntactic verification. Overall, this paper highlights the importance of employing a hybrid architecture that incorporates multiple approaches to provide high recognition rates

Feedback Based Architecture for Reading Check Courtesy Amounts

In recent years, a number of large-scale applications continue to rely heavily on the use of paper as the dominant medium, either on intra-organization basis or on inter-organization basis, including paper intensive applications in the check processing application. In many countries, the value of each check is read by human eyes before the check is physically transported, in stages, from the point it was presented to the location of the branch of the bank which issued the blank check to the concerned account holder. Such process of manual reading of each check involves significant time and cost. In this research, a new approach is introduced to read the numerical amount field on the check; also known as the courtesy amount field. In the case of check processing, the segmentation of unconstrained strings into individual digits is a challenging task because one needs to accommodate special cases involving: connected or overlapping digits, broken digits, and digits physically connected to a piece of stroke that belongs to a neighboring digit. The system described in this paper involves three stages: segmentation, normalization, and the recognition of each character using a neural network classifier, with results better than many other methods in the literaratu

Offline Handwritten Signature Verification - Literature Review

The area of Handwritten Signature Verification has been broadly researched in the last decades, but remains an open research problem. The objective of signature verification systems is to discriminate if a given signature is genuine (produced by the claimed individual), or a forgery (produced by an impostor). This has demonstrated to be a challenging task, in particular in the offline (static) scenario, that uses images of scanned signatures, where the dynamic information about the signing process is not available. Many advancements have been proposed in the literature in the last 5-10 years, most notably the application of Deep Learning methods to learn feature representations from signature images. In this paper, we present how the problem has been handled in the past few decades, analyze the recent advancements in the field, and the potential directions for future research.Comment: Accepted to the International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA 2017

Off-line Thai handwriting recognition in legal amount

Thai handwriting in legal amounts is a challenging problem and a new field in the area of handwriting recognition research. The focus of this thesis is to implement Thai handwriting recognition system. A preliminary data set of Thai handwriting in legal amounts is designed. The samples in the data set are characters and words of the Thai legal amounts and a set of legal amounts phrases collected from a number of native Thai volunteers. At the preprocessing and recognition process, techniques are introduced to improve the characters recognition rates. The characters are divided into two smaller subgroups by their writing levels named body and high groups. The recognition rates of both groups are increased based on their distinguished features. The writing level separation algorithms are implemented using the size and position of characters. Empirical experiments are set to test the best combination of the feature to increase the recognition rates. Traditional recognition systems are modified to give the accumulative top-3 ranked answers to cover the possible character classes. At the postprocessing process level, the lexicon matching algorithms are implemented to match the ranked characters with the legal amount words. These matched words are joined together to form possible choices of amounts. These amounts will have their syntax checked in the last stage. Several syntax violations are caused by consequence faulty character segmentation and recognition resulting from connecting or broken characters. The anomaly in handwriting caused by these characters are mainly detected by their size and shape. During the recovery process, the possible word boundary patterns can be pre-defined and used to segment the hypothesis words. These words are identified by the word recognition and the results are joined with previously matched words to form the full amounts and checked by the syntax rules again. From 154 amounts written by 10 writers, the rejection rate is 14.9 percent with the recovery processes. The recognition rate for the accepted amount is 100 percent

A Strategy for Selecting Classes of Symbols from Classes of Graphemes in HMM-Based Handwritten Word Recognition

This paper presents a new strategy for selecting classes of symbols from classes of graphemes in HMM-based handwritten word recognition from Brazilian legal amounts. This paper discusses features, graphemes and symbols, as our baseline system is based on a global approach in which the explicit segmentation of words into letters or pseudo-letters is avoided and HMM models are used. For this framework, the input data are the symbols of an alphabet based on graphemes extracted from the word images visible on the Hidden Markov Model. The idea is to introduce high-level concepts, such as perceptual features (loops, ascenders, descenders, concavities and convexities) and to provide fast and informative feedback about the information contained in each class of grapheme for symbol class selection. The paper presents an algorithm based on Mutual Information and HMM working in the same evaluation process. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to select from the “original” grapheme set (composed of 94 graphemes) an alphabet of symbols (composed of 29 symbols). We conclude that the discriminating power of the grapheme is very important for consolidating an alphabet of symbols.Este artigo descreve uma metodologia para seleção de classes de símbolos a partir de classesde grafemas em um sistema de reconhecimento de palavras manuscritas do extenso de cheques bancáriosbrasileiros baseado em HMM (Hidden Markov Models). Este artigo discute as definições de primitivas,grafemas e símbolos considerando um enfoque Global para o reconhecimento das palavras, o qual evita asegmentação das palavras em letras ou pseudo-letras utilizando HMM. Assim, a entrada para os modelosconsiste em uma descrição da palavra a partir de um alfabeto de símbolos gerados a partir dos grafemasextraídos das imagens das palavras, sendo esta a representação visível para o HMM. Portanto, a idéia éintroduzir uma conceituação de alto nível, tais como primitivas perceptivas (laços, ascendentes,descendentes, concavidades e convexidades) e fornecer um modo de retro-alimentação rápido e informativosobre a informação contida em cada classe de grafema, permitindo uma seleção de classes de símbolos. Oartigo apresenta o algoritmo com base na Informação Mútua (Mutual Information) e HMM, ambostrabalhando em um mesmo processo de avaliação. Os resultados experimentais demonstram que é possívelselecionar a partir de um conjunto “original” de grafemas (composto por 94 grafemas) um alfabeto desímbolos (composto por 29 símbolos). O artigo conclui que o poder discriminante dos grafemas é muitoimportante para a consolidação de um alfabeto de símbolos.Este artigo descreve uma metodologia para seleção de classes de símbolos a partir de classesde grafemas em um sistema de reconhecimento de palavras manuscritas do extenso de cheques bancáriosbrasileiros baseado em HMM (Hidden Markov Models). Este artigo discute as definições de primitivas,grafemas e símbolos considerando um enfoque Global para o reconhecimento das palavras, o qual evita asegmentação das palavras em letras ou pseudo-letras utilizando HMM. Assim, a entrada para os modelosconsiste em uma descrição da palavra a partir de um alfabeto de símbolos gerados a partir dos grafemasextraídos das imagens das palavras, sendo esta a representação visível para o HMM. Portanto, a idéia éintroduzir uma conceituação de alto nível, tais como primitivas perceptivas (laços, ascendentes,descendentes, concavidades e convexidades) e fornecer um modo de retro-alimentação rápido e informativosobre a informação contida em cada classe de grafema, permitindo uma seleção de classes de símbolos. Oartigo apresenta o algoritmo com base na Informação Mútua (Mutual Information) e HMM, ambostrabalhando em um mesmo processo de avaliação. Os resultados experimentais demonstram que é possívelselecionar a partir de um conjunto “original” de grafemas (composto por 94 grafemas) um alfabeto desímbolos (composto por 29 símbolos). O artigo conclui que o poder discriminante dos grafemas é muitoimportante para a consolidação de um alfabeto de símbolos

HANDWRITTEN SIGNATURE VERIFICATION BASED ON THE USE OF GRAY LEVEL VALUES

Recently several papers have appeared in the literature which propose pseudo-dynamic features for automatic static handwritten signature verification based on the use of gray level values from signature stroke pixels. Good results have been obtained using rotation invariant uniform local binary patterns LBP plus LBP and statistical measures from gray level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) with MCYT and GPDS offline signature corpuses. In these studies the corpuses contain signatures written on a uniform white “nondistorting” background, however the gray level distribution of signature strokes changes when it is written on a complex background, such as a check or an invoice. The aim of this paper is to measure gray level features robustness when it is distorted by a complex background and also to propose more stable features. A set of different checks and invoices with varying background complexity is blended with the MCYT and GPDS signatures. The blending model is based on multiplication. The signature models are trained with genuine signatures on white background and tested with other genuine and forgeries mixed with different backgrounds. Results show that a basic version of local binary patterns (LBP) or local derivative and directional patterns are more robust than rotation invariant uniform LBP or GLCM features to the gray level distortion when using a support vector machine with histogram oriented kernels as a classifier

Adding feedback to improve segmentation and recognition of handwritten numerals

Thesis (S.B. and M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-69).by Susan A. Dey.S.B.and M.Eng

The ESPOSALLES database: An ancient marriage license corpus for off-line handwriting recognition

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern RecognitionVolume 46, Issue 6, June 2013, Pages 1658–1669 DOI: 10.1016/j.patcog.2012.11.024[EN] Historical records of daily activities provide intriguing insights into the life of our ancestors, useful for demography studies and genealogical research. Automatic processing of historical documents, however, has mostly been focused on single works of literature and less on social records, which tend to have a distinct layout, structure, and vocabulary. Such information is usually collected by expert demographers that devote a lot of time to manually transcribe them. This paper presents a new database, compiled from a marriage license books collection, to support research in automatic handwriting recognition for historical documents containing social records. Marriage license books are documents that were used for centuries by ecclesiastical institutions to register marriage licenses. Books from this collection are handwritten and span nearly half a millennium until the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, a study is presented about the capability of state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems, when applied to the presented database. Baseline results are reported for reference in future studies. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Work supported by the EC (FEDER/FSE) and the Spanish MEC/MICINN under the MIPRCV ‘‘Consolider Ingenio 2010’’ program (CSD2007-00018), MITTRAL (TIN2009-14633-C03-01) and KEDIHC ((TIN2009-14633-C03-03) projects. This work has been partially supported by the European Research Council Advanced Grant (ERC-2010-AdG-20100407: 269796-5CofM) and the European seventh framework project (FP7-PEOPLE-2008-IAPP: 230653-ADAO). Also supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2009/014 and FPU AP2007-02867, and by the Universitat Politecnica de Val encia (PAID-05-11). We would also like to thank the Center for Demographic Studies (UAB) and the Cathedral of Barcelona.Romero Gómez, V.; Fornés, A.; Serrano Martínez-Santos, N.; Sánchez Peiró, JA.; Toselli ., AH.; Frinken, V.; Vidal, E.... (2013). The ESPOSALLES database: An ancient marriage license corpus for off-line handwriting recognition. Pattern Recognition. 46(6):1658-1669. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2012.11.024S1658166946