Handwritten isolated word recognition: an approach based on Mutual Information for feature set validation

The paper presents the application of the Mutual Information criterion (T.M. Cover and J.A. Thomas, 1991) to validate feature sets extracted from handwritten words in Brazilian legal amounts. The lexicon includes a subset of short words without ascenders/descenders and subsets of words with the same prefix or suffix. These particularities of the Brazilian lexicon show that it is necessary to improve the perpetual feature set with complementary geometric features, and also modeling the prefix and suffix of the words. Finally, the experiments show the viability of our approach.