Fast multi-language LSTM-based online handwriting recognition

Victor Carbune, Pedro Gonnet, Thomas Deselaers, Henry A. Rowley, Alexander N. Daryin, Marcos Calvo, Li-Lun Wang, Daniel Keysers, Sandro Feuz, Philippe Gervais

Abstract: We describe an online handwriting system that is able to support 102 languages using a deep neural network architecture. This new system has completely replaced our previous segment-and-decode-based system and reduced the error rate by 20–40% relative for most languages. Further, we report new state-of-the-art results on IAM-OnDB for both the open and closed dataset setting. The system combines methods from sequence recognition with a new input encoding using Bézier curves. This leads to up to $$10\times $$ 10× faster recognition times compared to our previous system. Through a series of experiments, we determine the optimal configuration of our models and report the results of our setup on a number of additional public datasets.