Off-line Handwriting Recognition by Recurrent Error Propagation Networks

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in computer handwriting recognition as a means of making computers accessible to a wider range of people. A complete system for off-line, automatic recognition of handwriting is described, which takes word images scanned from a handwritten page and produces word-level output. Normalisation and preprocessing methods are described and details of the recurrent error propagation network and Viterbi decoder used for recognition are given. Results are reported and compared with those presented by researchers using other methods.