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In this paper, we extend the concept of moment-based normalization of images from digit recognition to the recognition of handwritten text. Image moments provide robust estimates for text characteristics such as size and position of words within an image. For handwriting recognition the normalization procedure is applied to image slices independently. Additionally, a novel moment-based algorithm for line-thickness normalization is presented. The proposed normalization methods are evaluated on the RIMES database of French handwriting and the IAM database of English handwriting. For RIMES we achieve an improvement from 16.7% word error rate to 13.4% and for IAM from 46.6% to 37.3%.

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In this paper, we present a unified search strategy for open vocabulary handwriting recognition using weighted finite state transducers. Additionally to a standard word-level language model we introduce a separate n-gram character-level language model for out-of-vocabulary word detection and recognition. The probabilities assigned by those two models are combined into one Bayes decision rule. We evaluate the proposed method on the IAM database of English handwriting. An improvement from 22.2% word error rate to 17.3% is achieved comparing to the closed-vocabulary scenario and the best published result.

Abstract-This paper describes the RWTH system for large vocabulary Arabic handwriting recognition. The recognizer is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) with state of the art methods for visual/language modeling and decoding. The feature extraction is based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) which estimate the posterior distribution over the character labels for each observation. Discriminative training using the Minimum Phone Error (MPE) criterion is used to train the HMMs. The recognition is done with the help of n-gram Language Models (LMs) trained using in-domain text data. Unsupervised writer adaptation is also performed using the Constrained Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (CMLLR) feature adaptation. The RWTH Arabic handwriting recognition system gave competitive results in previous handwriting recognition competitions. The used techniques allows to improve the performance of the system participating in the OpenHaRT 2013 evaluation.