Handwriting recognition for a postal check reading system

This pa,per discusses several aspects of automatic handwriting recognition designed for a postal check reading system. We first present the general methodology, including a new approach called perturbation method. Then we explain how the general methodology is applied to three subproblems in handwriting recognition, namely, the recognition of isolated numerals. that of numeral strings, and the recognition of cursively handwritten words drawn from a small lexicon. Experimental results performed on worldwide standard databases show that, our systems are either equivalent to or better than state-of-the-art systems, A preliminary experiment of reading real Swiss checks shows that the system rejects about 50% and correctly recognises the remaining checks.