Off-line handwritten word recognition (HWR) using a single contextual hidden Markov model

A complete scheme for totally unconstrained handwritten word recognition based on a single contextual hidden Markov model (HMM) is proposed. The scheme includes a morphology- and heuristics-based segmentation algorithm and a modified Viterbi algorithm that searches the (l+1)st globally best path based on the previous l best paths. The results of detailed experiments for which the overall recognition rate is up to 89.4% are reported.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>