Multi-lingual Handwriting Recovery Framework based on Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder with Attention model

For several decades, the offline handwriting recognition problem has escaped a satisfactory solution. In the field of online recognition, researchers have had more successful performance, but the ability to extract dynamic information from static images has not been well explored yet. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-lingual word handwriting recovery framework based on a convolutional denoising autoencoder with an attention model for pen up / down, velocity and temporal order recovery. The proposed framework consists of extracting robust features from a handwriting image using a stacked denoising autoencoder and an encoder Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU) model. Then, the obtained vectors are decoded to produce an online script with dynamic characteristics using a BGRU with temporal attention. Evaluation is done on a Latin and Arabic Online and offline handwriting character / word databases and the proposed framework achieves high competitive results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of its kind.