Integration of contextual information in online handwriting representation

Abstract

Robust handwriting recognition of complex patterns of arbitrary scale, orientation and location is yet elusive to date as reaching a good recognition rate is not trivial for most of the application developments in this field. Cursive scripts with complex character shapes, such as Arabic and Persian, make the recognition task even more challenging. This complexity requires sophisticated representations and learning methods, and comprehensive data samples. A direct approaches to achieve a better performance is focusing on designing more powerful building blocks of a handwriting recognition system which are pattern representation and pattern classification. In this paper we aim to scale up the efficiency of online recognition systems for Arabic characters by integrating novel representation techniques into efficient classification methods. We investigate the idea of incorporating two novel feature representations for online character data. We advocate the usefulness and practicality of these features in classification methods using neural networks and support vector machines. The combinations of proposed representations with related classifiers can offer a module for recognition tasks which can deal with any two-dimensional online pattern. Our empirical results confirm the higher distinctiveness and robustness to character deformations obtained by the proposed representation compared to currently available techniques. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.