Handwritten Text Recognition from an Image with Android Application

Abstract

Nowadays, Storing information from handwritten documents for future use is becoming necessary. An easy way to store information is to capture handwritten documents and save them in image format. Recognizing the text or characters present in the image is called Optical Character Recognition. Text extraction from the image in the recent research is challenging due to stroke variation, inconsistent writing style, Cursive handwriting, etc. We have proposed CNN and BiLSTM models for text recognition in this work. This model is evaluated on the IAM dataset and achieved 92% character recognition accuracy. This model is deployed to the Firebase as a custom model to increase usability. We have developed an android application that will allow the user to capture or browse the image and extract the text from the picture by calling the firebase model and saving text in the file. To store the text file user can browse for the appropriate location. The proposed model works on both printed and handwritten text.