A Sequence Labeling Convolutional Network and Its Application to Handwritten String Recognition

Handwritten string recognition has been struggling with connected patterns fiercely. Segmentation-free and over-segmentation frameworks are commonly applied to deal with this issue. For the past years, RNN combining with CTC has occupied the domain of segmentation-free handwritten string recognition, while CNN is just employed as a single character recognizer in the over-segmentation framework. The main challenges for CNN to directly recognize handwritten strings are the appropriate processing of arbitrary input string length, which implies arbitrary input image size, and reasonable design of the output layer. In this paper, we propose a sequence labeling convolutional network for the recognition of handwritten strings, in particular, the connected patterns. We properly design the structure of the network to predict how many characters present in the input images and what exactly they are at every position. Spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) is utilized with a new implementation to handle arbitrary string length. Moreover, we propose a more flexible pooling strategy called FSPP to adapt the network to the straightforward recognition of long strings better. Experiments conducted on handwritten digital strings from two benchmark datasets and our own cell-phone number dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed network.