Finding words in alphabet soup: Inference on freeform character recognition for historical scripts

[摘要] This paper develops word recognition methods for historical handwritten cursive and printed documents. It employs a powerful segmentation-free letter detection method based upon joint boosting with histograms of gradients as features. Efficient inference on an ensemble of hidden Markov models can select the most probable sequence of candidate character detections to recognize complete words in ambiguous handwritten text, drawing on character n-gram and physical separation models. Experiments with two corpora of handwritten historic documents show that this approach recognizes known words more accurately than previous efforts, and can also recognize out-of-vocabulary words. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

[发布日期] 2009-12-01

[效力级别]  Proceedings Paper

[关键词] Character recognition;Cursive text;Historical text