Sub-word Based Offline Handwritten Farsi Word Recognition Using Recurrent Neural Network

In this paper, we present a segmentation-based method for offline Farsi handwritten word recognition. Although most segmentation-based systems suffer from segmentation errors within the first stages of recognition, using the inherent features of the Farsi writing script, we have segmented the words into sub-words. Instead of using a single complex classifier with many (N) output classes, we have created N simple recurrent neural network classifiers, each having only true/false outputs with the ability to recognize sub-words. Through the extraction of the number of sub-words in each word, and labeling the position of each sub-word (beginning/middle/end), many of the sub-word classifiers can be pruned, and a few remaining sub-word classifiers can be evaluated during the sub-word recognition stage. The candidate subwords are then joined together and the closest word from the lexicon is chosen. The proposed method was evaluated using the Iranshahr database, which consists of 17,000 samples of Iranian handwritten city names. The results show the high recognition accuracy of the proposed method.