We propose an improved HMM formulation for offline handwriting recognition (HWR). The main contribution of this
work is using modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) [1] within HMM framework. In an MQDF-HMM the
state observation likelihood is calculated by a weighted combination of MQDF likelihoods of individual Gaussians of
GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model). The quadratic discriminant function (QDF) of a multivariate Gaussian can be rewritten
by avoiding the inverse of covariance matrix by using the Eigen values and Eigen vectors of it. The MQDF is
derived from QDF by substituting few of badly estimated lower-most Eigen values by an appropriate constant. The
estimation errors of non-dominant Eigen vectors and Eigen values of covariance matrix for which the training data is
insufficient can be controlled by this approach. MQDF has been successfully shown to improve the character recognition
performance [1]. The usage of MQDF in HMM improves the computation, storage and modeling power of HMM when
there is limited training data. We have got encouraging results on offline handwritten character (NIST database) and
word recognition in English using MQDF HMMs.
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