Script recognition using hidden Markov models

A handwritten script recognition system is presented which uses Hidden Markov Models (HMM), a technique widely used in speech recognition. The script is encoded as templates in the form of a sequence of quantised inclination angles of short equal length vectors together with some additional features. A HMM is created for each written word from a set of training data. Incoming templates are recognised by calculating which model has the highest probability for producing that template. The task chosen to test the system is that of handwritten word recognition, where the words are digits written by one person. Results are given which show that HMMs provide a versatile pattern matching tool suitable for some image processing tasks as well as speech processing problems.