NIST form-based handprint recognition system (release 2.0)
Michael D. Garris, James L. Blue, Gerald T. Candela, Patrick J Grothe, rStanley A Janet, Charles L. Wilson · 1997
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a new release of a standard reference form-based handprint recognition system for evaluating optical character recognition.As with the first release, NIST is making the new recognition system fireely available to the general public on CD-ROM.This source code test- bed, written entirely in C, contains both the original and the new recognition systems.New utilities are provided for conducting generalized form registration, intelligent form removal with character stroke preservation, robust text-line isolation in handprinted paragraphs, adaptive character segmentation based on writing style, and sophisticated Multi- Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network classification.A software implementation of the machine learning algorithm used to train the new MLP is included in the test-bed, enabling recipients to train the neural network for pattern rec- ognition applications other than character classification.A host of data structures and low-level utilities are also pro- vided.These include the application of spatial histograms, affine image transformations, simple image morphology, skew crxrection, cormected components, Karhimen Lo^ve feature extraction, dictionary matching, and many more.The software test-bed has been successfully compiled and tested on a host of UNIX workstations including computers manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Sihcon (jraphics Incorporated, and Sim Microsystems.^Approximately25 person-years have been invested in this software test-bed, and it can be obtained free of charge on CD-ROM by sending a letter of request via postal mail or FAX to NIST.This report documents the new recognition software test-bed in terms of its installation, organization, and functionality.