A cursive script-recognition system based on human reading models

The human reading process is undoubtedly extremely complex; however, much work has been carried out in determining possible mechanisms behind it. A computer recognition system that makes use of some of the proposed models of human reading has been developed at the University of Nottingham. With it, we attempt to solve the problem of recognising handwriting on-line. The system, called NuScript, is based on the blackboard paradigm of artificial intelligence (AI). It initially uses easily extracted features to reduce a large lexicon to a smaller list of candidate words. Later stages use increasingly sophisticated knowledge sources, based on a diverse set of AI paradigms and other pattern-recognition techniques, to determine and subsequently refine a confidence value for each candidate. A description of the elements of the human recognition models on which the system is based is followed by a general description of the computer recognition system as a whole.