Recognition-directed recovering of temporal information from handwriting images

This paper analyses a handwriting recognition system for offline cursive words based on HMMs. It compares two approaches for transforming offline handwriting available as two-dimensional images into one-dimensional input signals that can be processed by HMMs. In the first approach, a left–right scan of the word is performed resulting in a sequence of feature vectors. In the second approach, a more subtle process attempts to recover the temporal order of the strokes that form words as they were written. This is accomplished by a graph model that generates a set of paths, each path being a possible temporal order of the handwriting. The recognition process then selects the most likely temporal stroke order based on knowledge that has been acquired from a large set of handwriting samples for which the temporal information was available. We show experimentally that such an offline recognition system using the recovered temporal order can achieve recognition performances that are much better than those obtained with the simple left–right order, and that come close to those of an online recognition system. We have been able to assess the ordering quality of handwriting when comparing true ordering and recovered one, and we also analyze the situations where offline and online information differ and what the consequences are on the recognition performances. For these evaluations, we have used about 30,000 words from the IRONOFF database that features both the online signal and offline signal for each word.