Evaluation and Application of Recognition Confidence in OCR

Recognition confidence plays an important role in the selection of rejection threshold and the combination of multiple classifiers. In this paper, we first present a systematic theory on classifier's confidence, which includes the definition, the concept of generalized confidence, optimal rejection theorem and the relationship between confidence value and recognition rate. Then we propose a method for the evaluation of recognition confidence. The theory and method are strongly supported by the practice in handwritten numeral recognition and off-line handwritten Chinese character recognition.

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