Knowledge Transfer Using Neural Network Based Approach for Handwritten Text Recognition

The goal of a writer adaptive handwriting recognition system is to build a model that improves the recognition of a generic recognition model for a specific author. In this work, we show how structural representation learned from a generic writer-independent handwriting recognition model can be customized to individual authors. Convolutional Neural Network has shown outstanding performance in learning image-based representation that was used for classification. Additionally, they have been used along with Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) or its variations like, LSTM and GRU layers to analyze and understand sequences in handwriting recognition, sentence analysis, voice recognition etc. In most cases, the CNNs serve as a feature extractor instead of low-level hand-designed features that were used previously for the above-mentioned classification tasks. We design a method to reuse weights from layers trained on the IAM offline handwritten dataset to compute mid-level image representation for text in the Washington and Moore dataset. We show that despite differences in the writing style, fonts across these datasets, the transferred representation is able to capture a spatio-temporal representation leading to significantly improved recognition results. We hypothesize that the performance is solely not dependent on the number of samples and the model is evaluated with varying amount of fine-tuning samples showing promising results backing the hypothesis.