Generation and Use of Synthetic Training Data in Cursive Handwriting Recognition

Three different methods for the synthetic generation of handwritten text are introduced. These methods are experimentally evaluated in the context of a cursive handwriting recognition task, using an HMM-based recognizer. In the experiments, the performance of a traditional recognizer, which is trained on data produced by human writers, is compared to a system that is trained on synthetic data only. Under the most elaborate synthetic handwriting generation model, a level of performance comparable to, or even slightly better than, the system trained on the writing of humans was observed.