Handwritten text retrieval using two-stage pattern matching with handwritten query

Describes a method of retrieving handwritten text with handwritten queries. The properties of handwritten Japanese texts have prevented conventional handwritten European text retrieval methods from being applied to Japanese. To address this problem, the proposed method was devised to segment texts into blocks and search stored texts by using a two-stage flexible matching method. At the first stage, the features used for flexibly matching block series were designed to reduce the amount of the processing which produces features of combined blocks. In the second stage, flexible matching between corresponding blocks was employed to exclude erroneous candidates. Experiments demonstrated 99.5% recall and 20% precision in the case of queries with four characters