
How to build a handwriting reader from scratch with deep learning - arunpgandhi
https://nanonets.com/blog/handwritten-character-recognition/
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arunpgandhi
Hey guys, here's the updated URL: [https://nanonets.com/blog/handwritten-form-
ocr-handwriting-r...](https://nanonets.com/blog/handwritten-form-ocr-
handwriting-recognition/)

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Anil1331
Hello, I am the author of this article

OCR is considered a solved problem in general but not in entirety

A key component of it, Handwriting recognition is still a challenging problem.

Handwriting Text Recognition(HTR) is the task of recognizing handwritten human
text

It involves using both Computer Vision and NLP

Every person has a different style of handwriting, thus solving the task of
HTR is much more difficult than OCR

In this article I cover the progress of various techniques involved in solving
HTR and all the SOTA models

In addition, I have discussed the way to train your own HTR model on your own
dataset

Happy to discuss more if you have any queries about handwritten text
recognition

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clabpeobe32
Why not use the industry standard acronyms? ICR intelligent character
recognition is the term for extracting handwritten characters.

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clabpeobe32
Apologies, I see you clarify in the article.

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xtiansimon
Sort of off-topic, but an interesting angle on handwriting recignition-- The
Sony DPT-RP1 digital paper system has a stylus for handwritten notes and
highlighting. They do not have handwriting recognition; however, there is a
search feature to find occurrences in your document of handwritten characters
_star_ and _asterisk_. Personally, I would like to see these two tokens
expanded to a customizable set of handwritten search tokens. The Remarkable
tablet's SDK was recently discussed [1] here at HN, and this article is
inspiring in this regard.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295443)

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WWWWH
I don't think it's off topic :) This is a really useful and I suspect under-
rated feature. There was a similar feature in an older version of the
Livescribe digital pen software. You could search for any text string, without
having run the handwriting to text function. This was incredibly useful as you
could search for terms not in the dictionary (so for example in my lab book I
could search for gene names that handwriting to text would routinely
scramble).

Sadly they removed it, and I've never seen anything similar again (with the
exception of the DTP-RP1 example you mention).

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schaefer
What a great write up! This looks like an amazingly fun topic to work on.

