Abstract: In this paper we present a method to optimize the topology of linear left-to-right hidden Markov models. These models are very popular for sequential signals modeling on tasks such as handwriting recognition. Many topology definition methods select the number of states for a character model based
on character length. This can be a drawback when characters are shorter than the minimum allowed by the model, since they can not be properly trained nor recognized. The proposed method optimizes the number of states per model by automatically including convenient skip-state transitions and therefore it avoids the aforementioned problem.We discuss and compare our method with other character length-based methods such the Fixed, Bakis and Quantile methods. Our proposal performs well on off-line handwriting recognition task.