ENHANCING CURSIVE WORD RECOGNITION PERFORMANCE BY THE INTEGRATION OF ALL THE AVAILABLE INFORMATION

Microsoft, Motorola, Siemens, Hitachi, IAPR, NICI, IUF Segmentation­by­recognition is a successful approach for recognizing cursively handwritten words. Its main strength is that the interdependence of strokes forming a letter is correctly taken into account by the use of a character recognizer, that evaluates an aggregate of strokes (character hypothesis) as a whole. However, a straightforward implementation of such an approach would fail to take into account the dependencies of each character hypothesis with the adjacent hypotheses and with global characteristics of the image, like the position of upperline and baseline, the average dimensions of strokes, etc. This paper describes a cursive handwritten word recognition system in which recognition performance is enhanced by the use of several complementary sources of information, like the relationships of the strokes that make up a hypothesis among themselves and with the preceding strokes, the position of the hypothesis with respect to baseline and upperline, the statistics of the number of strokes making up letters belonging to different classes, the dispersion of character data around the different code vectors used to measure distances, the plausibility for a hypothesis of being a spurious stroke (extra ink). Experimental results are presented, putting into evidence the contribution of each source of information to the overall performance.

A SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE CURSIVE WORD SEGMENTATION METHOD

Microsoft, Motorola, Siemens, Hitachi, IAPR, NICI, IUF A simple procedure for cursive word oversegmentation is presented, which is based on the analysis of the handwritten profiles and on the extraction of ``white holes\'\'. It follows the policy of using simple rules on complex data and sophisticated rules on simpler data. Experimental results show robustness and performances comparable with the best ones presented in the literature.

Magnetisation measurements on tubular samples of YBa2Cu3O7-y

Magnetisation hysteresis measurements have been performed at T=4.2 K and T=77 K on tubular samples of YBa2Cu3O7-y. There is clear evidence of two hysteresis loops. The first, at very low magnetic fields, represents a total-body superconducting behaviour with a shielding current circulating in the whole sample; the second one, at high magnetic fields, represents the hysteresis of single grains (or superconducting regions of smaller dimensions). This model emerges also from various bulk magnetisation and AC susceptibility measurements, as has been pointed out elsewhere. The particular geometry used assigns to the identified contributions opposite signs and it is potentially able to separate them. The critical currents related to the two hysteresis loops are very different in value (about four orders of magnitude at T=4.2 K and two-to-three orders of magnitude at 77 K). A preliminary evaluation of some critical fields related to both the hysteresis loops is given