Handwriting Recognition Paradigms in Interpretation, Transcription, and Search Applications

Recognition of handwritten documents has been a success in well-constrained domains, such as automatic recognition of handwritten postal addresses and validating bank check amounts. However, unconstrained offline handwriting recognition is still a very challenging task when lexicon size is very large. Thus, the large amount of handwritten material of the world, historical manuscripts and contemporary documents, are still inaccessible by search engines. We will describe our seminal work in real-time handwriting recognition which paved the way for the first deployment of end-to-end handwritten address interpretation system. We will also present loosely constrained applications such as indexing and searching hand-filled forms and unconstrained handwritten documents. We will conclude with an overview of our current research in transcription of historical manuscripts and using handwriting for web security.