Online trajectory recovery from offline handwritten Japanese kanji characters of multiple strokes

Abstract

We propose a deep neural network-based method to recover dynamic online trajectories from offline handwritten Japanese kanji character images. It is a challenging task since Japanese kanji characters consist of multiple strokes. Our proposed model has three main components: Convolutional Neural Network-based encoder, Long Short-Term Memory Network-based decoder with an attention layer, and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). The encoder focuses on feature extraction while the decoder refers to the extracted features and generates time-sequences of GMM parameters. The attention layer is the key component for trajectory recovery. The GMM provides robustness to style variations so that the proposed model does not overfit to training samples. In the experiments, the proposed method is evaluated by both visual verification and handwritten character recognition. This is the first attempt to use online recovered trajectories to help improve offline handwriting recognition performance. Although the visual verification reveals some problems, the recognition experiments demonstrate the effect of trajectory recovery in improving offline handwritten character recognition accuracy when online recognition of the recovered trajectories are combined.