We propose a handwriting recognition method that utilizes the n-gram statistics of the English language. It is based on the linguistic property that very few pairs of English words share exactly the same letter bigrams. This property is exploited to bring context to the recognition stage and to avoid segmentation. The recognition is based on detecting bigram co-occurrences. Even with naive features and a limited reference set, it recognizes over 45% of lexicon words that it has never seen before in handwritten form.
Citation:
Adnan EI-Nasan, George Nagy, "On-Line Handwriting Recognition Based on Bigram Co-Occurrences," icpr, vol. 3, pp.30740, 16th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'02) - Volume 3, 2002