Handwritten word recognition for real-time applications

Abstract

A fast handwritten word recognition system for real time applications is presented. Preprocessing, segmentation and feature extraction are implemented using chain code representation. Dynamic matching between each character of a lexicon entry and segment(s) of input word image is used for ranking words in the lexicon. Speed of the entire recognition process is about 200 msec on a single SPARC-10 platform for lexicon size of 10. A top choice performance of 96% is achieved on a database of postal words captured at 212 dpi.