4. Handwritten sentence recognition

4.1 Introduction

Research into handwritten sentence recognition has focused on two complementary areas:

• one close to the signal and which aims to define a method for segmenting texts into words;

• the other is more focused on natural language processing, and concerns the integration of language models at sentence level, to reinforce recognition results by relying on the context of the words to be recognized.

The simultaneous consideration of these two issues is an essential step in designing a sentence-level recognition system that is robust, particularly in the face of loosening constraints on writing style.