On-line cursive script recognition using time delay neural networks and hidden Markov models

Presents a writer independent system for on-line handwriting recognition which can handle both cursive script and hand-print. The pen trajectory is recorded by a touch sensitive pad, such as those used by note-pad computers. The input to the system contains the pen trajectory information, encoded as a time-ordered sequence of feature vectors. Features include X and Y coordinates, pen-lifts, speed, direction and curvature of the pen trajectory. A time delay neural network with local connections and shared weights is used to estimate a posteriori probabilities for characters in a word. A hidden Markov model segments the word into characters in a way which optimizes the global word score, taking a dictionary into account. A geometrical normalization scheme and a fast but efficient dictionary search are also presented. Trained on 20000 unconstrained cursive words from 59 writers and using a 25000 word dictionary the authors reached a 89% character and 80% word recognition rate on test data from a disjoint set of writers