A distributed scheme for lexicon-driven handwritten word recognition and its application to large vocabulary problems

Many offline handwritten word recognition systems have been proposed since the early nineties. Most systems reported high recognition rates, however, they overlooked a very important factor in the process: speed factor. The authors explore the potential for speeding up an offline handwritten word recognition system via concurrency. The goal of the system is to achieve both full accuracy and high speed when taking into account large vocabularies. This was accomplished by integrating the recognition process with multiprocessing and distributed computing concepts. Experimental results showed that the multiprocessing environment is very promising in enhancing a sequential offline handwritten word recognition system performance.