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This work proposes an attention-based sequence-to-sequence model for handwritten word recognition and explores transfer learning for data-efficient training of HTR systems. To overcome training data scarcity, this work leverages models pre-trained on scene text images as a starting point towards tailoring the handwriting recognition models. ResNet feature extraction and bidirectional LSTM-based sequence modeling stages together form an encoder. The prediction stage consists of a decoder and a content-based attention mechanism. The effectiveness of the proposed end-to-end HTR system has been empirically evaluated on a novel multi-writer dataset Imgur5K and the IAM dataset. The experimental results evaluate the performance of the HTR framework, further supported by an in-depth analysis of the error cases. Source code and pre-trained models are available at GitHub (https://github.com/dmitrijsk/AttentionHTR).

Transcribing struck-through, handwritten words, for example for the purpose of genetic criticism, can pose a challenge to both humans and machines, due to the obstructive properties of the superimposed strokes. This paper investigates the use of paired image to image translation approaches to remove strikethrough strokes from handwritten words. Four different neural network architectures are examined, ranging from a few simple convolutional layers to deeper ones, employing Dense blocks. Experimental results, obtained from one synthetic and one genuine paired strikethrough dataset, confirm that the proposed paired models outperform the CycleGAN-based state of the art, while using less than a sixth of the trainable parameters.

Obtaining the original, clean forms of struck-through handwritten words can be of interest to literary scholars, focusing on tasks such as genetic criticism. In addition to this, replacing struck-through words can also have a positive impact on text recognition tasks. This work presents a novel unsupervised approach for strikethrough removal from handwritten words, employing cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (CycleGANs). The removal performance is improved upon by extending the network with an attribute-guided approach. Furthermore, two new datasets, a synthetic multi-writer set, based on the IAM database, and a genuine single-writer dataset, are introduced for the training and evaluation of the models. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, where the examined attribute-guided models achieve F1 scores above 0.8 on the synthetic test set, improving upon the performance of the regular CycleGAN. Despite being trained exclusively on the synthetic dataset, the examined models even produce convincing cleaned images for genuine struck-through words. 

This paper presents an approach towards word recognition based on embedded prototype subspace classification. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. Firstly, a new dataset for word recognition is presented, which is extracted from the Esposalles database consisting of the Barcelona cathedral marriage records. Secondly, different clustering techniques are evaluated for Embedded Prototype Subspace Classifiers. The dataset, containing 30 different classes of words is heavily imbalanced, and some word classes are very similar, which renders the classification task rather challenging. For ease of use, no stratified sampling is done in advance, and the impact of different data splits is evaluated for different clustering techniques. It will be demonstrated that the original clustering technique based on scaling the bandwidth has to be adjusted for this new dataset. Thirdly, an algorithm is therefore proposed that finds k clusters, striving to obtain a certain amount of feature points in each cluster, rather than finding some clusters based on scaling the Silverman’s rule of thumb. Furthermore, Self Organising Maps are also evaluated as both a clustering and embedding technique.

Handwritten text recognition is a daunting task, due to complex characteristics of handwritten letters. Deep learning based methods have achieved significant advances in recognizing challenging handwritten texts because of its ability to learn and accurately classify intricate patterns. However, there are some limitations of deep learning, such as lack of well-defined mathematical model, black-box learning mechanism, etc., which pose challenges. This paper aims at going beyond the blackbox learning and proposes a novel learning framework called as Embedded Prototype Subspace Classification, that is based on the well-known subspace method, to recognise handwritten letters in a fast and efficient manner. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is empirically evaluated on popular datasets using standard evaluation measures.