Hierarchical hybrid MLP/HMM or rather MLP features for a discriminatively trained Gaussian HMM: A comparison for offline handwriting recognition

We use neural network based features extracted by a hierarchical multilayer-perceptron (MLP) network either in a hybrid MLP/HMM approach or to discriminatively retrain a Gaussian hidden Markov model (GHMM) system in a tandem approach. MLP networks have been successfully used to model long-term and non-linear features dependencies in automatic speech and optical character recognition. In offline hand writing recognition, MLPs have been mostly used for isolated character and word recognition in hybrid approaches. Here we analyze MLPs within an LVCSR framework for continuous handwriting recognition using discriminative MMI/MPE training. Especially hybrid MLP/HMM and discriminatively retrained MLP-GHMM tandem approaches are evaluated. Significant improvements and competitive results are re ported for a closed-vocabulary task on the IfN/ENIT Arabic handwriting database and for a large-vocabulary task using the IAM English handwriting database.