3. Isolated word recognition

3.1 Approaches to handwritten word recognition

If we look at the problems associated with handwriting recognition, handwritten word recognition is quite naturally the next step after isolated character recognition. When it comes to word recognition, there are two major problems:

• the coupling between the segmentation process and the recognition process ;

• the integration of lexical linguistic knowledge.

All the approaches developed for handwritten word recognition have to deal with these two issues. This is why they are often categorized according to the strategies implemented to overcome them.

A natural approach to word recognition is to try to...