Data Incubation - Synthesizing Missing Data for Handwriting Recognition
AuthorsJen-Hao Rick Chang, Martin Bresler, Youssouf Chherawala, Adrien Delaye, Thomas Deselaers, Ryan Dixon, Oncel Tuzel
AuthorsJen-Hao Rick Chang, Martin Bresler, Youssouf Chherawala, Adrien Delaye, Thomas Deselaers, Ryan Dixon, Oncel Tuzel
In this paper, we demonstrate how a generative model can be used to build a better recognizer through the control of content and style. We are building an online handwriting recognizer from a modest amount of training samples. By training our controllable handwriting synthesizer on the same data, we can synthesize handwriting with previously underrepresented content (e.g., URLs and email addresses) and style (e.g., cursive and slanted). Moreover, we propose a framework to analyze a recognizer that is trained with a mixture of real and synthetic training data. We use the framework to optimize data synthesis and demonstrate significant improvement on handwriting recognition over a model trained on real data only. Overall, we achieve a 66% reduction in Character Error Rate.
Handwriting recognition is more important than ever given the prevalence of mobile phones, tablets, and wearable gear like smartwatches. The large symbol inventory required to support Chinese handwriting recognition on such mobile devices poses unique challenges. This article describes how we met those challenges to achieve real-time performance on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch (in Scribble mode). Our recognition system, based on deep learning, accurately handles a set of up to 30,000 characters. To achieve acceptable accuracy, we paid particular attention to data collection conditions, representativeness of writing styles, and training regimen. We found that, with proper care, even larger inventories are within reach. Our experiments show that accuracy only degrades slowly as the inventory increases, as long as we use training data of sufficient quality and in sufficient quantity.