CNN-RNN BASED HANDWRITTEN TEXT RECOGNITION

At present most of the scripts are handwritten due to the ease of using a pen tip in place of a keyboard, hence errors are common due to illegibility of the human handwriting. To avoid this problem handwriting recognition is essential. Offline handwritten Text recognition (OHTR) has become one of the major areas of research in recent times because of the need to eliminate errors due to misinterpretation of handwritten text and the need for automation to improve efficiency. The application of this system can be seen in fields like handwritten application interpretations, postal address recognition, signature verification, and various others. In this project, offline handwritten Text recognition is performed using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) which uses the architecture of Recurrent Neural network (RNN) and connectionist temporal classification (CTC). The neural network is trained and tested using the IAM database containing handwritten English text. The implementation of this work is done using image segmentation-based handwritten text recognition where OpenCV is used for performing image processing and TensorFlow is used for training and text recognition. This whole system is developed using python and the output is displayed in a word file.