A Format-Driven Handwritten Word Recognition System

A format-driven word recognition system is proposed for recognition of handwritten words. Unlike most traditional handwritten word recognizers being given a set of target words as lexicon, we assume that our system is given a set of format descriptions other than lexicon words. Applications of the pro-posed system include recognition of relatively more important keywords such as postal codes, titles or trademarks. The for-mat descriptions are in terms of the lengths of the keywords, the types of the characters in the keywords and positional in-formations. Due to the important role of the keywords in the applications, the recognition expectations in terms of recogni-tion rate and accuracy are usually higher then lexicon-driven word recognizers. 1