Syntactic methodology of pruning large lexicons in cursive script recognition

In this paper, we present a holistic technique for pruning of large lexicons for recognition of off-line cursive script words. The technique involves extraction and representation of downward pen-strokes from the off-line cursive word to obtain a descriptor which provides a coarse characterization of word shape. Elastic matching is used to match the image descriptor with "ideala" descriptors corresponding to lexicon entries organized as a trie of stroke classes. On a set of 23,335 real cursive word images the reduction is about 70% with accuracy above 75%.