Offline Handwriting Recognition System - A Review

Neha Tripathi Dr. Pushpinder Singh Patheja

School of Computer Science and Engineering School of Computer Science and Engineering
VIT Bhopal, MP, India VIT Bhopal, MP, India

Abstract
In the endeavor of going paperless and transforming every feasible process to digital it is more critical than
ever to have most efficient and accurate handwriting recognition system in place. There is a great
enthusiasm among research community to perfect the system with the help of most recent and advanced
technologies. The aim of this paper is to review various stages of handwriting recognition process. Also,
different techniques employed in the field of handwriting recognition are analyzed to understand their
approach, effectiveness, and efficiency.
There are various applications of handwriting recognition system such as postal address recognition,
manually filled-out tax forms recognition, bank cheque recognition etc. The remainder of the paper has
following sections: Introduction, History of Handwriting recognition System, Literature review, Conclusion
and future scope.

1. Introduction
Handwriting recognition is a very popular
research area in the field of Image Processing. Image Acquisition
Online and offline recognition are the two types
of handwriting recognition system. Offline
recognition is more difficult than online since
Pre-Processing
there is no real time input such as pen stroke,
applied pressure etc., in the offline system. In
offline recognition system already written
documents, scripts, and images are taken as an Segmentation
input. There are many problems which offline
system faces like distorted images, ambiguous
letters, and complex handwriting etc. The input
with such issues impacts system’s efficiency and Feature Extraction
accuracy rate very much.

Offline handwriting recognition works on the

principles of Optical Character Recognition Classification and
(OCR). In OCR, handwritten documents, printed Recognition
documents etc. are translated into an image and
are used later for character recognition. OCR Fig 1: Stages of Handwriting Recognition
consists of following stages in the handwriting
recognition process.
2. History
since 1950's the recognition of handwriting has
been under research. since then there is a
continues effort put by the researcher in this
area. Earlier much of the world’s information
was held captive in hard copy documents. OCR
systems convert this information into electronic
form but with many flaws.
An OCR system which is making too many
mistakes has much room for improvement. In
1965 Reader’s Digest and RCA collaborated to
build an optical character recognition system. In
1985 structural approaches were proposed with
the statistical methods. In this method system
focused on shape of the characters as shown
below.
Fig 2: Different shapes of lowercase alphabets
3. Stages of Handwriting Recognition
The handwriting recognition system follows 5
stages listed in Fig 1. The output of one stage
becomes the input for the next stage.
3.1 Image Acquisition
The very first stage of the HCR system is the
acquisition of the images using a camera or an
optical scanner. All the handwritten documents
are converted to images of a standard format
such as .jpg, .bmp, .png etc.
3.2 Pre-Processing
The image acquired is not always in the desired
condition and may contain lot of information and
data which is not required for character
recognition. There are also defects and
distortions in the scanned image which might
hinder the identification process. The pre-
processing stage is to deal with all the noise in
the image and prepare it for further processing.
To begin with, the image of handwritten text is
converted into grayscale format. This format of
image helps in separating the character from the
background. The gray scale image is later
converted to binary image to keep the important
information and remove the unwanted one.
Binarization helps in increasing the processing
speed and reducing the space requirement.
3.3 Segmentation
Segmentation is the next important stage in the
process of handwriting recognition. In
segmentation characters are separated from
each other and can be analyzed more
accurately with high recognition rate. There are
two types of segmentation:
External Segmentation divides the document in
logical writing units such as paragraphs,
sentences, or words. This is a significant step in
layout analysis.
Internal Segmentation is the isolation of letters
and characters.
At the end of the segmentation we get images
of different size and shapes due to the variable
height and width of characters.
Although many methods have been developed
for segmentation, yet the segmentation of
cursive handwritten documents is an unsolved
problem. There is still a need of better
segmentation algorithms to deal with tightly
packed words of diverse style and handwriting
size.
3.4 Feature Extraction
Next step is feature extraction in which all the
features which can identify a character uniquely
are captured. These features are used to classify
and recognize the characters accurately. In this
stage each character is represented as a feature
vector, which becomes its identity. It is
important to extract the correct features from
the dataset, as wrongly chosen features can give
false information and lead to many problems for
the recognition stage.
3.5 Classification and Recognition
There are many approaches for classification and
recognition such as template matching,
statistical techniques, and neural networks.
3.5.1 Template matching
Template matching is the process of OCR in
which the images of two characters are
compared. The process involves finding a sub
image called a template inside the image. In
template matching the degree of similarities
between two vectors (groups of pixels, shapes,
curvatures, etc.) in the feature space are
determined. Template matching has high speed
but its not very effective if the handwriting is not
very clear due to any reason.
3.5.2 Statistical Techniques
An approach where the variabilities are captured
through probabilistic models. There are several
approaches which come under this technique.
K-Nearest Neighbor rule (KNN) is one of the
simplest algorithms mostly used for
classification. It stores all the available cases and
classifies new case based on the similarity
measure (e.g. distance function). A case is
classified by a majority vote of its neighbors, with
the case being assigned to the class most
common amongst its K nearest neighbors
measured by a distance function. The drawback
of this algorithm is the complexity in searching
the nearest neighbors for each sample.
Bayesian Classifier is primarily used for text
classification, which involves high dimensional
training data set. It works well when probability
is used to represent uncertainty in all parts of a
statistical model. This is also called as the
probabilistic classifier as it has least probability
of misclassifying a random pattern.
Hidden Markov Model (HMM) formalizes
sequential observation of a system without
perfect access to state (i.e., state is “hidden”).
Also this is used for situations in which the data
consists of a sequence of observations and the
observations depend (probabilistically) on the
internal state of a dynamical system. HMM
extends the concepts of Markov model by
including the case in which the observation is the
probabilistic function of the state. This model
provides segmentation free recognition system.
Fig 3: State Diagram in HMM
Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a supervised
learning technique that analyzes data and does
pattern recognition using hyperplanes which act
as a decision boundary among different classes.
It can also be used on non-linear data using
kernel function. The accuracy rate is very high in
this technique.
3.5.3 Artificial Neural Network
Neural Network is inspired by biological neural
networks in the brain and works in pretty much
similar way. It is represented as interconnections
which are capable o calculations and hence used
for pattern recognition. It works in three main
paradigms:
• Supervised Learning - Cost function is
calculated based on the given data.
• Unsupervised Learning - Cost function can
be any function of the input data, need not
be dependent.
• Reinforcement Learning - The data
generated due to the agents’ interaction
with the environment is given. At each point
of action an instantaneous cost function is
generated.
ANN is first applied on set of samples, and then
is used to recognize the characters having a
similar feature set. ANN is high noise tolerant
recognition system.
Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) is the most widely
studied and used neural network. MLP with
backpropagation is among the most popular and
versatile forms of neural network classifiers for
handwriting recognition. For printed characters
and handwritten digits artificial neural network
has proven to be an excellent recognizer, but
recognition of handwritten words still requires
more research. The use of Neural Networks has
become extremely popular, and will definitely
enable the researchers to move closer to solving
the handwriting recognition problem.
Fig 4: Neural Network Layers
4. Conclusion
In this research paper we have reviewed so many
techniques like Template Matching, KNN,
Bayesian Classifier, Support Vector Machine,
Neural Network techniques etc. for offline
handwriting recognition. This material serves as
a guide for the readers for future research in this
area. There is still room for improvement to
increase the recognition accuracy rate and their
effectiveness.
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