Improving Text Recognition using Optical and Language Model Writer Adaptation

State-of-the-art methods for handwriting text recognition are based on deep learning approaches and language modeling that require large data sets during training. In practice, there are some applications where the system processes mono-writer documents, and would thus benefit from being trained on examples from that writer. However, this is not common to have numerous examples coming from just one writer. In this paper, we propose an approach to adapt both the optical model and the language model to a particular writer, from a generic system trained on large data sets with a variety of examples. We show the benefits of the optical and language model writer adaptation. Our approach reaches competitive results on the READ 2018 data set, which is dedicated to model adaptation to particular writers.