This paper describes two approaches for Amharic word recognition in unconstrained handwritten text using HMMs. The first approach builds word models from concatenated features of constituent characters and in the second method HMMs of constituent characters are concatenated to form word model. In both cases, the features used for training and recognition are a set of primitive strokes and their spatial relationships. The recognition system does not require segmentation of characters but requires text line detection and extraction of structural features, which is done by making use of direction field tensor. The performance of the recognition system is tested by a dataset of unconstrained handwritten documents collected from various sources, and promising results are obtained. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Ethiopic script is used by several languages in Ethiopia for writing. We present a comprehensive dataset of handwritten Ethiopic script called DEHR (Dataset for Ethiopic Handwriting Recognition) captured both offline and online. The offline dataset includes isolated characters, Ethiopian church documents and ordinary handwritten texts dealing with various real-life issues. The ordinary texts and isolated characters were freely written by several participants. The church documents are written in Geez and Amharic languages whereas the language for ordinary texts is Amharic only. The online dataset was collected by using two Digimemo devices of different sizes. For isolated characters and online dataset, all the 265 character samples used by Amharic language are included. The dataset is intended to set a benchmark for training and/or testing handwriting recognition, character and word segmentation, and text line detection. The dataset is can be accessed by contacting the authors or via http://www.hh.se/staff/josef/.

Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia and uses Ethiopic script for writing. In this paper, we present writer-independent HMM-based Amharic word recognition for offline handwritten text. The underlying units of the recognition system are a set of primitive strokes whose combinations form handwritten Ethiopic characters. For each character, possibly occurring sequences of primitive strokes and their spatial relationships, collectively termed as primitive structural features, are stored as feature list. Hidden Markov models for Amharic words are trained with such sequences of structural features of characters constituting words. The recognition phase does not require segmentation of characters but only requires text line detection and extraction of structural features in each text line. Text lines and primitive structural features are extracted by making use of direction field tensor. The performance of the recognition system is tested by a database of unconstrained handwritten documents collected from various sources.

This paper describes two appraches for Amharic word recognition in unconstrained handwritten text using HMMs. The first approach builds word models from concatenated features of constituent characters and in the second method HMMs of constituent characters are concatenated to form word model. In both cases, the features used for training and recognition are primitive strokes and their spatial relationships. The recognition system does not require segmentation of characters but requires text line detection and extraction of structural features, which is done by making use of direction field tensor. The performance of the recognition system is tested by DEHR dataset of unconstrained handwritten documents collected from various sources.

This paper describes an offline handwriting recognition system for Amharic words based on lexicon. The system computes direction fields of scanned handwritten documents, from which pseudo-characters are segmented. The pseudo-characters are organized based on their proximity and direction to form text lines. Words are then segmented by analyzing the relative gap between subsequent pseudocharacters in text lines. For each segmented word image, the structural characteristics of pseudo-characters are syntactically analyzed to predict a set of plausible characters forming the word. The most likelihood word is finally selected among candidates by matching against the lexicon. The system is tested by a database of unconstrained handwritten Amharic documents collected from various sources. The lexicon is prepared from words appearing in the collected database.

Online recognition of handwritten characters is gaining a renewed interest as it provides a natural way of data entry for a wide variety of handheld devices. In this paper, we present online handwriting recognition system for Ethiopic script based on the structural and syntactical analysis of the strokes forming characters. The complex structures of characters are represented by the spatio- temporal relationships of simple-shaped strokes called primitives. A special tree structure is used to model spatio- temporal relationships of the strokes. The tree generates a unique set of primitive stroke sequences for each character, and for recognition each stroke sequence is matched against a stored knowledge base. Characters are also classified based on their structural similarity to select a plausible set of characters for un unknown input, which improves recognition and processing time. We also present a dataset collected for training and testing online recognition systems for Ethiopic script. The dataset is prepared in accordance with the international standard UNIPEN format. The recognition system is tested with the collected dataset and experimental results are reported.

This paper presents writer-independent offline handwritten character recognition for Ethiopic script. The recognition is based on the characteristics of primitive strokes that make up characters. The spatial relationships of primitives whose combinations form complex structures of Ethiopic characters are used as a basis for recognition. Although this approach efficiently recognizes properly written characters, the recognition rate drops for characters where the spatial relationships of their primitives could not be drawn. This happens mostly when the connections between primitives are not properly written, which is a common case in handwriting. To complement the recognition, we classify characters based on the characteristics of their primitives, resulting in grouping of characters in a five-dimensional space. Once the type of characters is identified, recognition can be achieved with a minimal set of information from their spatial relationships. A comprehensive database is also developed to standardize the evaluation of research works on offline Ethiopic handwriting recognition systems. Our proposed system is tested is with the database and experimental results are reported.

In real life, documents contain several font types, styles, and sizes. However, many character recognition systems show good results for specific type of documents and fail to produce satisfactory results for others. Over the past decades, various pattern recognition techniques have been applied with the aim to develop recognition systems insensitive to variations in the characteristics of documents. In this paper, we present a robust recognition system for Ethiopic script using a hybrid of classifiers. The complex structures of Ethiopic characters are structurally and syntactically analyzed, and represented as a pattern of simpler graphical units called primitives. The pattern is used for classification of characters using similarity-based matching and neural network classifier. The classification result is further refined by using template matching. A pair of directional filters is used for creating templates and extracting structural features. The recognition system is tested by real life documents and experimental results are reported.

Artificial neural networks are one of the most commonly used tools for character recognition problems, and usually they take gray values of 2D character images as inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network classifier whose input is ID string patterns generated from the spatial relationships of primitive structures of Ethiopiccharacters. The spatial relationships of primitives are modeled by a special tree structure from which a unique set of string patterns are generated for each character. Training theneural network with string patterns of different font types and styles enables the classifier to handle variations in font types, sizes, and styles. We use a pair of directional filters forextracting primitives and their spatial relationships. The robustness of the proposed recognition system is tested by real life documents and experimental results are reported.

This paper presents a novel framework for recognition of Ethiopic characters using structural and syntactic techniques. Graphically complex characters are represented by the spatial relationships of less complex primitives which form a unique set of patterns for each character. The spatial relationship is represented by a special tree structure which is also used to generate string patterns of primitives. Recognition is then achieved by matching the generated string pattern against each pattern in the alphabet knowledge-base built for this purpose. The recognition system tolerates variations on the parameters of characters like font type, size and style. Direction field tensor is used as a tool to extract structural features.