Segmentation and recognition of handwritten pitman shorthand outlines using an interactive heuristic search

摘要

A new approach to the overall segmentation and interpretation of the consonant part of shorthand outlines is proposed in this paper. In the approach an interactive heuristic search scheme allows communication between bottom-up and top-down recognition processes. The communication, in turn, leads the direction of search towards the best or nearly the best interpretation of the consonant outline. Experiments using a set of 2058 shorthand outlines from five writers show that, in comparison with a non-interactive technique, the approach is efficient and produces an improvement from 65 to 85% in correct outline segmentation and an improvement from 48 to 57% in correct recognition of complicated consonant outlines.