Segmentation and recognition of handwritten dates: an HMM-MLP hybrid approach

摘要

This paper presents an HMM-MLP hybrid system for segmenting and recognizing complex date images written on Brazilian bank checks. Through the recognition process, the system makes use of an HMM-based approach to segment a date image into subfields. Then the three obligatory date subfields (day, month, and year) are processed. A neural approach has been adopted to decipher strings of digits (day and year) and a Markovian strategy to recognize and verify words (month). The final decision module makes an accept/reject decision. We also introduce the concept of metaclasses of digits to reduce the lexicon size of the day and year and improve the precision of their segmentation and recognition. Experiments show interesting results on date recognition.