Recognizing Handwritten Characters with Local Descriptors and Bags of Visual Words

We propose the use of several feature extraction methods, which have been shown before to perform well for object recog- nition, for recognizing handwritten characters. These methods are the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), a bag of visual words using pixel intensity information (BOW), and a bag of visual words using extracted HOG features (HOG-BOW). These feature extraction algorithms are compared to other well-known techniques: principal component analysis, the discrete cosine transform, and the direct use of pixel intensities. The extracted features are given to three different types of support vector machines for classification, namely a linear SVM, an SVM with the RBF kernel, and a linear SVM using L2-regularization. We have evaluated the six different feature descriptors and three SVM classifiers on three dif- ferent handwritten character datasets: Bangla, Odia and MNIST. The results show that the HOG-BOW, BOW and HOG method significantly outperform the other methods. The HOG-BOW method performs best with the L2-regularized SVM and obtains very high recognition accura- cies on all three datasets.

A* Path Planning for Line Segmentation of Handwritten Documents

This project describes the use of a novel A* path-planning algorithm for performing line segmentation of handwritten documents. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the use of a smart combination of simple soft cost functions that allows an artificial agent to compute paths separating the upper and lower text fields. The use of soft cost functions enables the agent to compute near-optimal separating paths even if the upper and lower text parts are overlapping in particular places. We have performed experiments on the Saint Gall and Monk line segmentation (MLS) datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs very well on the Saint Gall dataset, and also demonstrate that our algorithm is able to cope well with the much more complicated MLS dataset.

Captain's logs, 1777	Provincial archive, 1855	Early 15th century
MLS dataset

Saint Gall dataset

Windmill

Windmill (Dutch, called Molen), A windmill is a mill that converts the energy of wind into rotational energy by means of vanes called sails or blades. Centuries ago, windmills usually were used to mill grain, pump water, or both. Thus they often were gristmills, windpumps, or both. The majority of modern windmills take the form of wind turbines used to generate electricity, or windpumps used to pump water, either for land drainage or to extract groundwater. credit wikipedia.

What is a windmill ?