A Fast and Accurate Fully Convolutional Network for End-to-End Handwritten Chinese Text Segmentation and Recognition

Abstract

Handwritten Chinese Text Recognition (HCTR) is a challenging problem due to its high complexity. Previous methods based on over-segmentation, hidden Markov model (HMM) or long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN) have achieved great success in recognition results. However, all of them, including over-segmentation based methods, are incompetent in accurate segmentation of single character. To solve this problem, we propose a fast and accurate fully convolutional network for end-to-end segmentation and recognition of handwritten Chinese text. Experiments on CASIA-HWDB datasets and ICDAR 2013 competition dataset show that our method achieves a competitive performance on recognition and produces great character segmentation results. Moreover, our model reaches a real-time speed of 70 fps, which is fast enough for various applications.