Segmentation-Free Word Spotting in Handwritten Documents Using Scale Space Co-HoG Feature Descriptors

Abstract

In this chapter, the author present a segmentation-free-based word spotting method for handwritten documents using Scale Space co-occurrence histograms of oriented gradients (Co-HOG) feature descriptor. The chapter begin with introduction to word spotting, its challenges, and applications. It is followed by review of the existing techniques for word spotting in handwritten documents. The literature survey reveals that segmentation-based word spotting methods usually need a layout analysis step for word segmentation, and any segmentation errors can affect the subsequent word representations and matching steps. Hence, in order to overcome the drawbacks of segmentation-based methods, the author proposed segmentation-free word spotting using Scale Space Co-HOG feature descriptor. The proposed method is evaluated using mean Average Precision (mAP) through experimentation conducted on popular datasets such as GW and IAM. The performance of the proposed method is compared with existing state-of-the-segmentation and segmentation-free methods, and there is a considerable increase in accuracy.