Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration

We describe an offline unconstrained Arabic handwritten word recognition system based on segmentation-free approach and discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs) with explicit state duration. Character durations play a significant part in the recognition of cursive handwriting. The duration information i...

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Main Authors: M. Sellami, A. Ennaji, A. Benouareth
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2008-05-01
Series:EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2008/247354
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author M. Sellami
A. Ennaji
A. Benouareth
author_facet M. Sellami
A. Ennaji
A. Benouareth
author_sort M. Sellami
collection DOAJ
description We describe an offline unconstrained Arabic handwritten word recognition system based on segmentation-free approach and discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs) with explicit state duration. Character durations play a significant part in the recognition of cursive handwriting. The duration information is still mostly disregarded in HMM-based automatic cursive handwriting recognizers due to the fact that HMMs are deficient in modeling character durations properly. We will show experimentally that explicit state duration modeling in the HMM framework can significantly improve the discriminating capacity of the HMMs to deal with very difficult pattern recognition tasks such as unconstrained Arabic handwriting recognition. In order to carry out the letter and word model training and recognition more efficiently, we propose a new version of the Viterbi algorithm taking into account explicit state duration modeling. Three distributions (Gamma, Gauss, and Poisson) for the explicit state duration modeling have been used, and a comparison between them has been reported. To perform word recognition, the described system uses an original sliding window approach based on vertical projection histogram analysis of the word and extracts a new pertinent set of statistical and structural features from the word image. Several experiments have been performed using the IFN/ENIT benchmark database and the best recognition performances achieved by our system outperform those reported recently on the same database.
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spelling doaj.art-ccdd6077e2534deea251ce580e8edf5f2022-12-22T02:42:20ZengSpringerOpenEURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing1687-61721687-61802008-05-01200810.1155/2008/247354Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State DurationM. SellamiA. EnnajiA. BenouarethWe describe an offline unconstrained Arabic handwritten word recognition system based on segmentation-free approach and discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs) with explicit state duration. Character durations play a significant part in the recognition of cursive handwriting. The duration information is still mostly disregarded in HMM-based automatic cursive handwriting recognizers due to the fact that HMMs are deficient in modeling character durations properly. We will show experimentally that explicit state duration modeling in the HMM framework can significantly improve the discriminating capacity of the HMMs to deal with very difficult pattern recognition tasks such as unconstrained Arabic handwriting recognition. In order to carry out the letter and word model training and recognition more efficiently, we propose a new version of the Viterbi algorithm taking into account explicit state duration modeling. Three distributions (Gamma, Gauss, and Poisson) for the explicit state duration modeling have been used, and a comparison between them has been reported. To perform word recognition, the described system uses an original sliding window approach based on vertical projection histogram analysis of the word and extracts a new pertinent set of statistical and structural features from the word image. Several experiments have been performed using the IFN/ENIT benchmark database and the best recognition performances achieved by our system outperform those reported recently on the same database.http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2008/247354
spellingShingle M. Sellami
A. Ennaji
A. Benouareth
Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration
EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
title Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration
title_full Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration
title_fullStr Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration
title_full_unstemmed Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration
title_short Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration
title_sort arabic handwritten word recognition using hmms with explicit state duration
url http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2008/247354
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AT aennaji arabichandwrittenwordrecognitionusinghmmswithexplicitstateduration
AT abenouareth arabichandwrittenwordrecognitionusinghmmswithexplicitstateduration