Handwritten word recognition using multi-view analysis

Abstract

This paper brings a contribution to the problem of efficiently recognizing handwritten words from a limited size lexicon. For that, a multiple classifier system has been developed that analyzes the words from three different approximation levels, in order to get a computational approach inspired on the human reading process. For each approximation level a three-module architecture composed of a zoning mechanism (pseudo-segmenter), a feature extractor and a classifier is defined. The proposed application is the recognition of the Portuguese handwritten names of the months, for which a best recognition rate of 97.7% was obtained, using classifier combination. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.