Keyword spotting with convolutional deep belief networks and dynamic time warping

Abstract

To spot keywords on handwritten documents, we present a hybrid keyword spotting system, based on features extracted with Convolutional Deep Belief Networks and using Dynamic Time Warping for word scoring. Features are learned from word images, in an unsupervised manner, using a sliding window to extract horizontal patches. For two single writer historical data sets, it is shown that the proposed learned feature extractor outperforms two standard sets of features.