Improving Text Recognition using Optical and Language Model Writer Adaptation Stateoftheart methods for handwriting text recognition are based on deep learning approaches and language modeling that require large data sets during training. In practice, there are some applications where the system processes monowriter documents, and would thus benefit from being trained on examples from that writer. However, this is not common to have numerous examples coming from just one writer. In this paper, we propose an approach to adapt both the optical model and the language model to a particular writer, from a generic system trained on large data sets with a variety of examples. We show the benefits of the optical and language model writer adaptation. Our approach reaches competitive results on the READ 2018 data set, which is dedicated to model adaptation to particular writers.

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.