A Distributed Scheme for Lexicon-Driven Handwritten Word Recognition and its Application to Large Vocabulary Problems

Many off–line handwritten word recognition systems have been proposed since the early nineties. Most systems reported high recognition rates, however, they overlooked a very important factor in the process; speed factor. In this paper we explore the potential for speeding up an off–line handwritten word recognition system via concurrency. The goal of the system is to achieve both full accuracy and high speed when taking into account large vocabularies. This has been accomplished by integrating the recognition process with multiprocessing and distributed computing concepts. Experimental results showed that the multiprocessing environment is very promising in enhancing a sequential off–line handwritten word recognition system performance.