Use of Contextual Constraints in Recognition of Contour-Traced Handprinted Characters

A contour-tracing technique described in an earlier paper [9] was used along with monogram, bigram, and trigram contextual constraints to recognize handprinted characters. Error probabilities decreased by factors ranging from two to four over those which resulted when contextual constraints were ignored. A simple technique for searching over only the most probable bigrams and trigrams was used to significantly reduce the computation without reducing the recognition accuracy.