Algorithms for calculating the string edit distance are used in e.g. information retrieval and document analysis systems or for evaluation of text recognizers. Text recognition based on CTC-trained LSTM networks includes a decoding step to produce a string, possibly using a language model, and evaluation using the string edit distance. The decoded string can further be used as a query for database search, e.g. in document retrieval. We propose to closely integrate dictionary search with text recognition to train both combined in a continuous fashion. This work shows that LSTM networks are capable of calculating the string edit distance while allowing for an exchangeable dictionary to separate learned algorithm from data. This could be a step towards integrating text recognition and dictionary search in one deep network.
Multi-Dimensional Connectionist Classification is amethod for weakly supervised training of Deep Neural Networksfor segmentation-free multi-line offline handwriting recognition.MDCC applies Conditional Random Fields as an alignmentfunction for this task. We discuss the structure and patterns ofhandwritten text that can be used for building a CRF. Since CRFsare cyclic graphical models, we have to resort to approximateinference when calculating the alignment of multi-line text duringtraining, here in the form of Loopy Belief Propagation. This workconcludes with experimental results for transcribing small multi-line samples from the IAM Offline Handwriting DB which showthat MDCC is a competitive methodology.
Recent years have seen the proposal of several different gradient-based optimization methods for training artificial neural networks. Traditional methods include steepest descent with momentum, newer methods are based on per-parameter learning rates and some approximate Newton-step updates. This work contains the result of several experiments comparing different optimization methods. The experiments were targeted at offline handwriting recognition using hierarchical subsampling networks with recurrent LSTM layers. We present an overview of the used optimization methods, the results that were achieved and a discussion of why the methods lead to different results.
Increasing robustness of handwriting recognition using character N-Gram decoding on large lexica
(2016)
Offline handwriting recognition systems often include a decoding step, that is retrieving the most likely character sequence from the underlying machine learning algorithm. Decoding is sensitive to ranges of weakly predicted characters, caused e.g. by obstructions in the scanned document. We present a new algorithm for robust decoding of handwriting recognizer outputs using character n-grams. Multidimensional hierarchical subsampling artificial neural networks with Long-Short-Term-Memory cells have been successfully applied to offline handwriting recognition. Output activations from such networks, trained with Connectionist Temporal Classification, can be decoded with several different algorithms in order to retrieve the most likely literal string that it represents. We present a new algorithm for decoding the network output while restricting the possible strings to a large lexicon. The index used for this work is an n-gram index with tri-grams used for experimental comparisons. N-grams are extracted from the network output using a backtracking algorithm and each n-gram assigned a mean probability. The decoding result is obtained by intersecting the n-gram hit lists while calculating the total probability for each matched lexicon entry. We conclude with an experimental comparison of different decoding algorithms on a large lexicon.
Offline handwriting recognition systems often use LSTM networks, trained with line- or word-images. Multi-line text makes it necessary to use segmentation to explicitly obtain these images. Skewed, curved, overlapping, incorrectly written text, or noise can lead to errors during segmentation of multi-line text and reduces the overall recognition capacity of the system. Last year has seen the introduction of deep learning methods capable of segmentation-free recognition of whole paragraphs. Our method uses Conditional Random Fields to represent text and align it with the network output to calculate a loss function for training. Experiments are promising and show that the technique is capable of training a LSTM multi-line text recognition system.
