Abstract: Handwritten documents are not only preserved in historical archives but also widely used in administrative documents such as cheques and claims. With the rise of the deep learning era, many state-of-the-art approaches have achieved good performance on specific datasets for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). However, it is still challenging to solve real use cases because of the varied handwriting styles across different writers and the limited labeled data. Thus, both explorin a more robust handwriting recognition architectures and proposing methods to diminish the gap between the source and target data in an unsupervised way are
demanded.
In this thesis, firstly, we explore novel architectures for HTR, from Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) method with attention mechanism to non-recurrent Transformer-based method. Secondly, we focus on diminishing the performance gap between source and target data in an unsupervised way. Finally, we propose a group of generative methods for handwritten text images, which could be utilized to increase the training set to obtain a more robust recognizer. In addition, by simply modifying the generative method and joining it with a recognizer, we end up with an effective disentanglement method to distill textual content from handwriting styles so as to achieve a generalized recognition performance.
We outperform state-of-the-art HTR performances in the experimental results among different scientific and industrial datasets, which prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods. To the best of our knowledge, the non-recurrent recognizer and the disentanglement method are the first contributions in the handwriting recognition field. Furthermore, we have outlined the potential research lines, which would be interesting to explore in the future.

Abstract: Handwritten marriage licenses books have been used for centuries by ecclesiastical and secular institutions to register marriages. The information contained in these historical documents is useful for demography studies and
genealogical research, among others. Despite the generally simple structure of the text in these documents, automatic transcription and semantic information extraction is difficult due to the distinct and evolutionary vocabulary, which is composed mainly of proper names that change along the time. In previous
works we studied the use of category-based language models to both improve the automatic transcription accuracy and make easier the extraction of semantic information. Here we analyze the main causes of the semantic errors observed in previous results and apply a Grammatical Inference technique known as MGGI to improve the semantic accuracy of the language model obtained. Using this language model, full handwritten text recognition experiments have been carried out, with results supporting the interest of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is still a challenging problem because it must deal with two important difficulties: the variability among writing styles, and the scarcity of labelled data. To alleviate such problems, synthetic data generation and data augmentation are typically used to train HTR systems. However, training with such data produces encouraging but still inaccurate transcriptions in real words. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised writer adaptation approach that is able to automatically adjust a generic handwritten word recognizer, fully trained with synthetic fonts, towards a new incoming writer. We have experimentally validated our proposal using five different datasets, covering several challenges (i) the document source: modern and historic samples, which may involve paper degradation problems; (ii) different handwriting styles: single and multiple writer collections; and (iii) language, which involves different character combinations. Across these challenging collections, we show that our system is able to maintain its performance, thus, it provides a practical and generic approach to deal with new document collections without requiring any expensive and tedious manual annotation step.

Abstract: Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human annotation process, by requiring only a few images of each alphabet symbols. The method consists of detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from an alphabet, which could differ from the alphabet of the target domain. A second training step is then applied to reduce the gap between the source and the target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the unlabeled data. The evaluation on different datasets shows that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort. The code will be publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/dali92002/HTRbyMatching

Abstract: Historical ciphered manuscripts are a type of document where graphical symbols are used to encrypt their content instead of regular text. Nowadays, expert transcriptions can be found in libraries alongside the corresponding manuscript images. However, those transcriptions are not aligned, so these are barely usable for training deep learning-based recognition methods. To solve this issue, we propose a method to align each symbol in the transcript of an image with its visual representation by using an attention-based Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model. The core idea is that, by learning to recognise symbols sequence within a cipher line image, the model also identifies their position implicitly through an attention mechanism. Thus, the resulting symbol segmentation can be later used for training algorithms. The experimental evaluation shows that this method is promising, especially taking into account the small size of the cipher dataset.