Intelligent character recognition using fully convolutional neural networks

Abstract The recognition of handwritten text is challenging as there are virtually infinite ways a human can write the same message. Deep learning approaches for handwriting analysis have recently demonstrated breakthrough performance using both lexicon-based architectures and recurrent neural networks. This paper presents a fully convolutional network architecture which outputs arbitrary length symbol streams from handwritten text. A preprocessing step normalizes input blocks to a canonical representation which negates the need for costly recurrent symbol alignment correction. When a lexicon is known, we further introduce a probabilistic character error rate to correct errant word blocks. Our multi-state convolutional method is the first to demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both lexicon-based and arbitrary symbol based handwriting recognition benchmarks.