Segmentation-Free Korean Handwriting Recognition Using Neural Network Training

The idea of segmentation-free handwriting recognition has been introduced within the rise of deep learning. This technique is designed to recognize any script language/symbols as long as feedable training image set exists. The VGG-16 convolutional neural network model is used as a character spotting network using Faster R-CNN. Through the process of manual tagging, the location, size, and types of recognizable symbols are provided to train the network. This approach has been tested previously on text written in the Bangla script, where it has shown over 90% of accuracy overall. For Bangla, the network is trained and tested on Boise State Bangla Handwriting dataset. For Korean, the network is trained using the PE_92 Handwritten Korean character image database and shows promising results

Segmentation-Free Bangla Offline Handwriting Recognition Using Sequential Detection of Characters and Diacritics with a Faster R-CNN

This paper presents an offline handwriting recognition system for Bangla script using sequential detection of characters and diacritics with a Faster R-CNN. This is an entirely segmentation-free approach where the characters and associated diacritics are detected separately with different networks named C-Net and D-Net. Both of these networks were prepared with transfer learning from VGG-16. The essay scripts from the Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset along with standard data augmentation techniques were used for training and testing. The F1 scores for the C-Net and D-Net networks are 89.6% and 93.2% respectively. Afterwards, both of these detection modules were fused into a word recognition unit with CER (Character Error Rate) of 11.2% and WER (Word Error Rate) of 24.4%. A spell checker further minimized the errors to 8.9% and 21.5% respectively. This same method is likely to be equally effective on several other Abugida scripts similar to Bangla