Line-Members - a Novel Feature in On-Line Whiteboard Note Recognition

Confusion-matrices show that character mix-ups between similar looking letters differing in size rather than in shape (like “s” and “S” or “e” and “l”), as well as between tall letters (such as “M” and “t”) and small case letters (such as “s” and “a”) and vice versa can occur in on-line whiteboard note recognition. This paper introduces a novel feature called “line-member” feature that adds discriminance to the feature vector. Thereby, for certain sample points the script line association is estimated using the Viterbi algorithm and taken as a feature. As our experiments indicate, a relative improvement of r = 3.3 % in character level and r = 3.4 % in word level accuracy compared to a baseline system without the novel “line-member” feature can be achieved. In addition, the character confusion as described above can be reduced.

[1]  Nikos Fakotakis,et al.  New algorithms for skewing correction and slant removal on word-level [OCR] , 1999, ICECS'99. Proceedings of ICECS '99. 6th IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (Cat. No.99EX357).

[2]  Horst Bunke,et al.  HMM-based handwritten word recognition: on the optimization of the number of states, training iterations and Gaussian components , 2004, Pattern Recognit..

[3]  Marcus Liwicki,et al.  HMM-Based On-Line Recognition of Handwritten Whiteboard Notes , 2006 .

[4]  Sargur N. Srihari,et al.  Off-Line Cursive Script Word Recognition , 1989, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[5]  Yoshua Bengio,et al.  Word normalization for on-line handwritten word recognition , 1994 .

[6]  Marcus Liwicki,et al.  IAM-OnDB - an on-line English sentence database acquired from handwritten text on a whiteboard , 2005, Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'05).

[7]  Marcus Liwicki,et al.  Combining On-Line and Off-Line Systems for Handwriting Recognition , 2007, Ninth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2007).

[8]  Yoshua Bengio,et al.  Word normalization for online handwritten word recognition , 1994, Proceedings of the 12th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Vol. 3 - Conference C: Signal Processing (Cat. No.94CH3440-5).

[9]  Lawrence R. Rabiner,et al.  A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition , 1989, Proc. IEEE.

[10]  Alexander H. Waibel,et al.  Online handwriting recognition: the NPen++ recognizer , 2001, International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition.

[11]  Van Nostrand,et al.  Error Bounds for Convolutional Codes and an Asymptotically Optimum Decoding Algorithm , 1967 .

[12]  Gerhard Rigoll,et al.  Novel Hybrid NN/HMM Modelling Techniques for On-line Handwriting Recognition , 2006 .