An experimental HMM-based postal OCR system

It is almost universally accepted in speech recognition that phone- or word-level segmentation prior to recognition is neither feasible nor desirable, and in the dynamic (pen-based) handwriting recognition domain the success of segmentation-free techniques points to the same conclusion. But in image-based handwriting recognition, this conclusion is far from being firmly established, and the results presented in this paper show that systems employing character-level presegmentation can be more effective, even within the same HMM paradigm, than systems relying on sliding window feature extraction. We describe two variants of a Hidden Markov system recognizing handwritten addresses on VS mail, one with presegmentation and one without, and report results on the CEDAR data set.