Confidence-Scoring Post-Processing for Off-Line Handwritten-Character Recognition Verification

Abstract

We apply confidence-scoring techniques to verify the output of an off-line handwritten-character recognizer. We evaluate a variety of scoring functions, including likelihood ratios and estimated posterior probabilities of correctness, in a post-processing mode, to generate confidence scores. Using the post-processor in conjunction with a neural-netbased recognizer, on mixed-case letters, receiver-operatingcharacteristic (ROC) curves reveal that our post-processor is able to reject correctly 90% of recognizer errors while only falsely rejecting 18.6% of correctly-recognized letters. For isolated-digit recognition, we achieve a correct rejection rate of 95% while keeping false rejection down to 8.7%. 1