Reading handwritten German words in historical documents

The research project “Herbar Digital” was started in 2007 with the aim to digitize 3.5 million dried plants on paper sheets belonging to the Botanic Museum Berlin in Germany. Frequently there are printed labels on the sheets with handwritten annotations. The annotations are written by the determiner or the finder of the plant. They often describe the plant and give information about its name and where it was found. So procedures have to be developed in order to read the most important handwritten words on the sheets. A HMM-approach, a Fourier-approach and a DTW-approach are compared. With a limited number of words a recognition rate of about 95% is obtained by all three methods.