Deep Adaptive Learning for Writer Identification based on Single Handwritten Word Images

There are two types of information in each handwritten word image: explicit information which can be easily read or derived directly, such as lexical content or word length, and implicit attributes such as the author's identity. Whether features learned by a neural network for one task can be used for another task remains an open question. In this paper, we present a deep adaptive learning method for writer identification based on single-word images using multi-task learning. An auxiliary task is added to the training process to enforce the emergence of reusable features. Our proposed method transfers the benefits of the learned features of a convolutional neural network from an auxiliary task such as explicit content recognition to the main task of writer identification in a single procedure. Specifically, we propose a new adaptive convolutional layer to exploit the learned deep features. A multi-task neural network with one or several adaptive convolutional layers is trained end-to-end, to exploit robust generic features for a specific main task, i.e., writer identification. Three auxiliary tasks, corresponding to three explicit attributes of handwritten word images (lexical content, word length and character attributes), are evaluated. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed deep adaptive learning method can improve the performance of writer identification based on single-word images, compared to non-adaptive and simple linear-adaptive approaches.Comment: Under view of Pattern Recognitio

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