A Bayesian-based method of unconstrained handwritten offline Chinese text line recognition

This paper presents a new Bayesian-based method of unconstrained handwritten offline Chinese text line recognition. In this method, a sample of a real character or non-character in realistic handwritten text lines is jointly recognized by a traditional isolated character recognizer and a character verifier, which requires just a moderate number of handwritten text lines for training. To improve its ability to distinguish between real characters and non-characters, the isolated character recognizer is negatively trained using a linear discriminant analysis (LDA)-based strategy, which employs the outputs of a traditional MQDF classifier and the LDA transform to re-compute the posterior probability of isolated character recognition. In tests with 383 text lines in HIT-MW database, the proposed method achieved the character-level recognition rates of 71.37% without any language model, and 80.15% with a bi-gram language model, respectively. These promising results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method for unconstrained handwritten offline Chinese text line recognition.