Keyword Spotting from Online Chinese Handwritten Documents Using One-vs-All Trained Character Classifier

This paper presents a text query-based method for keyword spotting from online Chinese handwritten documents. The similarity between a text word and handwriting is obtained by combining the character similiarity scores given by a character classifier. To overcome the ambiguity of character segmentation, multiple candidates of character patterns are generated by over-segmentation, and sequences of candidate characters are matched with the query word in beam search. The character classifier is trained by one-vs-all strategy so that it gives high similarity to the target class and low scores to the others. Particularly, we use a one-vs-all trained prototype classifier and a support vector machine (SVM) classifier for similarity scoring. The method yielded promising performance in experiments on a database containing 550 pages of 110 writers. For words of four characters, the recall, precision and F measure are 87.25%, 94.84% and 90.88%, respectively.