Offline handwritten Devanagari word recognition: An HMM based approach

Abstract

A hidden Markov model (HMM) for recognition of handwritten Devanagari words is proposed. The HMM has the property that its states are not defined a priori, but are determined automatically based on a database of handwritten word images. A handwritten word is assumed to be a string of several stroke primitives. These are in fact the states of the proposed HMM and are found using certain mixture distributions. One HMM is constructed for each word. To classify an unknown word image, its class conditional probability for each HMM is computed. The classification scheme has been tested on a small handwritten Devanagari word database developed recently. The classification accuracy is 87.71% and 82.89% for training and test sets respectively. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.