Handwritten and Typewritten Text Identification and Recognition using Hidden Markov Models

We present a system for identification and recognition of handwritten and typewritten text from document images using hidden Markov models (HMMs) in this paper. Our text type identification uses OCR decoding to generate word boundaries followed by word-level handwritten/typewritten identification using HMMs. We show that the contextual constraints from the HMM significantly improves the identification performance over the conventional Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based method. Type identification is then used to estimate the frame sample rates and frame width of feature sequences for HMM OCR system for each type independently. This type-dependent approach to computing the frame sample rate and frame width shows significant improvement in OCR accuracy over type-independent approaches.