Dynamic-programming-based handwritten word recognition using the Choquet fuzzy integral as the match function

The Choquet fuzzy integral is applied to handwritten word recognition. A handwritten word recognition system is described. The word recognition system assigns a recognition confidence value to each string in a lexicon of candidate strings. The system uses a lexicon-driven approach that integrates segmentation and recognition via dynamic programming matching. The dynamic programming matcher finds a segmentation of the word image for each string in the lexicon. The traditional match score between a segmentation and a string is an average. In this paper, fuzzy integrals are used instead of an average. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of this approach. A surprising result is obtained that indicates a simple choice of fuzzy integral works better than a more complex choice. (C) 1996 SPIE and IS&T.