No Arabic abstract
We propose a novel transformer-based styled handwritten text image generation approach, HWT, that strives to learn both style-content entanglement as well as global and local writing style patterns. The proposed HWT captures the long and short range relationships within the style examples through a self-attention mechanism, thereby encoding both global and local style patterns. Further, the proposed transformer-based HWT comprises an encoder-decoder attention that enables style-content entanglement by gathering the style representation of each query character. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce a transformer-based generative network for styled handwritten text generation. Our proposed HWT generates realistic styled handwritten text images and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art demonstrated through extensive qualitative, quantitative and human-based evaluations. The proposed HWT can handle arbitrary length of text and any desired writing style in a few-shot setting. Further, our HWT generalizes well to the challenging scenario where both words and writing style are unseen during training, generating realistic styled handwritten text images.
This paper introduces an agent-centric approach to handle novelty in the visual recognition domain of handwriting recognition (HWR). An ideal transcription agent would rival or surpass human perception, being able to recognize known and new characters in an image, and detect any stylistic changes that may occur within or across documents. A key confound is the presence of novelty, which has continued to stymie even the best machine learning-based algorithms for these tasks. In handwritten documents, novelty can be a change in writer, character attributes, writing attributes, or overall document appearance, among other things. Instead of looking at each aspect independently, we suggest that an integrated agent that can process known characters and novelties simultaneously is a better strategy. This paper formalizes the domain of handwriting recognition with novelty, describes a baseline agent, introduces an evaluation protocol with benchmark data, and provides experimentation to set the state-of-the-art. Results show feasibility for the agent-centric approach, but more work is needed to approach human-levels of reading ability, giving the HWR community a formal basis to build upon as they solve this challenging problem.
We attempt to overcome the restriction of requiring a writing surface for handwriting recognition. In this study, we design a prototype of a stylus equipped with motion sensor, and utilizes gyroscopic and acceleration sensor reading to perform written letter classification using various deep learning techniques such as CNN and RNNs. We also explore various data augmentation techniques and their effects, reaching up to 86% accuracy.
In the recent years it turned out that multidimensional recurrent neural networks (MDRNN) perform very well for offline handwriting recognition tasks like the OpenHaRT 2013 evaluation DIR. With suitable writing preprocessing and dictionary lookup, our ARGUS software completed this task with an error rate of 26.27% in its primary setup.
Handwriting Recognition enables a person to scribble something on a piece of paper and then convert it into text. If we look into the practical reality there are enumerable styles in which a character may be written. These styles can be self combined to generate more styles. Even if a small child knows the basic styles a character can be written, he would be able to recognize characters written in styles intermediate between them or formed by their mixture. This motivates the use of Genetic Algorithms for the problem. In order to prove this, we made a pool of images of characters. We converted them to graphs. The graph of every character was intermixed to generate styles intermediate between the styles of parent character. Character recognition involved the matching of the graph generated from the unknown character image with the graphs generated by mixing. Using this method we received an accuracy of 98.44%.
Handwritten text recognition is challenging because of the virtually infinite ways a human can write the same message. Our fully convolutional handwriting model takes in a handwriting sample of unknown length and outputs an arbitrary stream of symbols. Our dual stream architecture uses both local and global context and mitigates the need for heavy preprocessing steps such as symbol alignment correction as well as complex post processing steps such as connectionist temporal classification, dictionary matching or language models. Using over 100 unique symbols, our model is agnostic to Latin-based languages, and is shown to be quite competitive with state of the art dictionary based methods on the popular IAM and RIMES datasets. When a dictionary is known, we further allow a probabilistic character error rate to correct errant word blocks. Finally, we introduce an attention based mechanism which can automatically target variants of handwriting, such as slant, stroke width, or noise.