Exploration of CNN Features for Online Handwriting Recognition Recently, convolution neural network (CNN) has demonstrated its powerful ability in learning features particularly from image data. In this work, its capability of feature learning in online handwriting is explored, by constructing various CNN architectures. The developed CNNs can process online handwriting directly unlike the existing works that convert the online handwriting to an image to utilize the architecture. The first convolution layer accepts the sequence of (x; y) coordinates along the trace of the character as an input and outputs a convolved filtered signal. Thereafter, via alternating steps of convolution and Rectified Linear Unit layers, in a hierarchical fashion, we obtain a set of deep features that can be employed for classification. We utilize the proposed CNN features to develop a Support Vector Machine (SVM)based character recognition system and an implicitsegmentation based large vocabulary word recognition system employing hidden Markov model (HMM) framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of its kind that applies CNN directly on the (x; y) coordinates of the online handwriting data. Experiments are carried out on two publicly available English online handwritten database: UNIPEN character and UNIPEN ICROW03 word databases. The obtained results are promising over the reported works employing the pointbased features.

A Scalable Handwritten Text Recognition System Many studies on (Offline) Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems have focused on building stateoftheart models for line recognition on small corpora. However, adding HTR capability to a large scale multilingual OCR system poses new challenges. This paper addresses three problems in building such systems: data, efficiency, and integration. Firstly, one of the biggest challenges is obtaining sufficient amounts of high quality training data. We address the problem by using online handwriting data collected for a large scale production online handwriting recognition system. We describe our image data generation pipeline and study how online data can be used to build HTR models. We show that the data improve the models significantly under the condition where only a small number of real images is available, which is usually the case for HTR models. It enables us to support a new script at substantially lower cost. Secondly, we propose a line recognition model based on neural networks without recurrent connections. The model achieves a comparable accuracy with LSTMbased models while allowing for better parallelism in training and inference. Finally, we present a simple way to integrate HTR models into an OCR system. These constitute a solution to bring HTR capability into a large scale OCR system.