Using a statistical language model to improve the performance of an HMM-based cursive handwriting recognition systems

  • Authors:
  • U.-V. Marti;H. Bunke

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. Bern, Bern, Switerland;Univ. Bern, Bern, Switerland

  • Venue:
  • Hidden Markov models
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In this paper, a system for the reading of totally unconstrained handwritten text is presented. The kernel of the system is a hidden Markov model (HMM) for handwriting recognition. The HMM is enhanced by a statistical language model. Thus linguistic knowledge beyond the lexicon level is incorporated in the recognition process. Another novel feature of the system is that the HMM is applied in such a way that the difficult problem of segmenting a line of text into individual words is avoided. A number of experiments with various language models and large vocabularies have been conducted. The language models used in the system were also analytically compared based on their perplexity.