Improving a DTW-Based Recognition Engine for On-line Handwritten Characters by Using MLPs

Our open source real-time recognition engine for on-line isolated handwritten characters is a 3-Nearest Neighbor classifier that uses approximate dynamic time warping comparisons with a set of prototypes filtered by two fast distance-based methods. This engine achieved excellent classification rates on two writer-independent tasks:UJIpenchars and Pendigits. We present the integration of multilayer perceptrons into our engine, an improvement that speeds up the recognition process by taking advantage of the independence of these networks’ classification times from training set sizes. We also present experimental results on our new publicly available UJIpenchars2 database and on Pendigits.