HANDWRITING RECOGNITION SYSTEM AND METHOD USING COMPOUND CHARACTERS FOR IMPROVED RECOGNITION ACCURACY

A handwriting recognition system and method whereby various character sequences (which are typically "slurred" together when handwritten) are each modelled as a single character ("compound character model" ) so as to provide increased decoding accuracy for slurred handwritten character sequences. In one aspect of the present invention, a method for generating a handwriting recognition system having compound character models comprises the steps of: providing an initial handwriting recognition system having individual character models; collecting and labelling a set of handwriting data; aligning the labelled set of handwriting data; generating compound character data using the aligned handwriting data; and retraining the initial recognition system with the compound character data to generate a new recognition system having compound character models. Once these compound character models are trained, they may be used to accurately decode slurred handwritten character sequences for which compound character models were previously generated. Once recognized, the compound characters are expanded into the constituent individual characters comprising the compound character.