Handwritten Chinese Text Recognition Using Separable Multi-Dimensional Recurrent Neural Network

The Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) has been demonstrated successful in handwritten text recognition of Western and Arabic scripts. It is totally segmentation free and can be trained directly from text line images. However, the application of LSTM-RNNs (including Multi-Dimensional LSTM-RNN (MDLSTM-RNN)) to Chinese text recognition has shown limited success, even when training them with large datasets and using pre-training on datasets of other languages. In this paper, we propose a handwritten Chinese text recognition method by using Separable MDLSTM-RNN (SMDLSTM-RNN) modules, which extract contextual information in various directions, and consume much less computation efforts and resources compared with the traditional MDLSTM-RNN. Experimental results on the ICDAR-2013 competition dataset show that the proposed method performs significantly better than the previous LSTM-based methods, and can compete with the state-of-the-art systems.