RNN-LSTM Based Beta-Elliptic Model for Online Handwriting Script Identification

Ramzi Zouari¹, Houcine Boubaker¹, and Monji Kherallah²

¹National School of Engineers of Sfax, University of Sfax, Tunisia

²Faculty of Sciences of Sfax, University of Sfax, Tunisia

Abstract: Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of applications dealing with sequential input data. In this context, the proposed system aims to classify the online handwriting scripts based on their labelled pseudo-words. To avoid the vanishing gradient problem, we have used a variant of recurrent network with Long Short-Term Memory. The representation of the sequential aspect of the data is done through the beta-elliptic model. It allows extracting the dynamics and kinematics profiles of different strokes constituting a script over the time. This system was assessed with a large vocabulary containing scripts from ADAB, UNIPEN and PENDIGIT databases. The experiments results show the effectiveness of the proposed system which reached a high recognition rate with only one recurrent layer and using the dropout technique.

Keywords: Online, pseudo, stroke, velocity, beta-elliptic, recurrent, dropout.

Received February 15, 2018; accepted April 20, 2018