An Off-Line Cursive Handwritten Word Recognition System and Its Application to Legal Amount Interpretation

Off-line cursive script recognition has got increasing attention during the last three decades since it is of interest in several areas such as banking and postal service. An off-line cursive handwritten word recognition system is described in this paper and is used for legal amount interpretation in personal checks. The proposed recognition system uses a set of geometric and topologic features to characterize each word. By considering the spatial distribution of these features in a word image, the proposed system maps each word into two strings of finite symbols. A local associative indexing scheme is then used on these strings to organize a vocabulary. When presented with an unknown word, the system uses the same indexing scheme to retrieve a set of candidate words likely to match the input word. A verification process is then carried out to find the best match among the candidate set. The performance of the proposed system has been tested with a legal amount image database from real bankchecks. The results obtained indicate that the proposed system is able to recognize legal amounts with great accuracy.