Handwritten word recognition by a multi-agent system: preliminary results

The general problem of handwriting recognition can be restricted to some specific applications, having a much lower complexity in terms of lexicon and grammatical rules, but still the same complexity in terms of symbolic pattern recognition. we have chosen such a practical application, i.e. reading the literal amount on a bank check, assuming that other tasks such as numerals reading are performed independently by other systems. Therefore we isolate a well defined problem where the number of possible words is limited and the syntactical rules are simple. The global idea is to perform the overall recognition by implementing the cooperation of several recognition subsystems; one for words, one for numerals, and a rule-based syntactical checker, each subsystem being possibly divided into other subsystems. This way of considering the problem is related to the so called multi-agent paradigm. We shall only present here the word recognition subsystem