Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
8-2005
Publication Title
ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Abstract
Recognition and retrieval of historical handwritten material is an unsolved problem. We propose a novel approach to recognizing and retrieving handwritten manuscripts, based upon word image classification as a key step. Decision trees with normalized pixels as features form the basis of a highly accurate AdaBoost classifier, trained on a corpus of word images that have been resized and sampled at a pyramid of resolutions. To stem problems from the highly skewed distribution of class frequencies, word classes with very few training samples are augmented with stochastically altered versions of the originals. This increases recognition performance substantially. On a standard corpus of 20 pages of handwritten material from the George Washington collection the recognition performance shows a substantial improvement in performance over previous published results (75% vs 65%). Following word recognition, retrieval is done using a language model over the recognized words. Retrieval performance also shows substantially improved results over previously published results on this database. Recognition/retrieval results on a more challenging database of 100 pages from the George Washington collection are also presented.
Keywords
Algorithms, Measurement, Experimentation, Handwriting retrieval, historical manuscripts, adaboost, decision theory
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGIR’05, August 15–19, 2005, Salvador, Brazil. Copyright 2005 ACM 1-59593-034-5/05/0008 ...$5.00
Recommended Citation
Howe, Nicholas; Rath, Toni M.; and Manmatha, R., "Boosted Decision Trees for Word Recognition in Handwritten Document Retrieval" (2005). Computer Science: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/csc_facpubs/115
Talk
Comments
Author’s submitted manuscript.
∗This work was supported in part by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and in part by the National Science Foundation under grant number IIS-9909073. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsor.