Augmentation of base classifier performance via HMMs on a handwritten character data set

Abstract

This paper presents results of a study of the performance of several base classifiers for recognition of handwritten characters of the modern Latin alphabet. Base classification performance is further enhanced by utilizing Viterbi error correction by determining the Viterbi sequence. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) models exploit relationships between letters within a word to determine the most likely sequence of characters. Four base classifiers are studied along with eight feature sets extracted from the handwritten dataset. The best classification performance after correction was 89.8%, and the average was 68.1%