# A limited-size ensemble of homogeneous CNN/LSTMs for high-performance word classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.03223 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03223/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Writer adaptation for offline text recognition: An exploration of neural network-based methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15071/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, long short-term memory neural networks (LSTMs) have been applied quite successfully to problems in handwritten text recognition. However, their strength is more located in handling sequences of variable length than in handling geometric variability of the image patterns. Furthermore, the best results for LSTMs are often based on large-scale training of an ensemble of network instances. In this paper, an end-to-end convolutional LSTM Neural Network is used to handle both geometric variation and sequence variability. We show that high performances can be reached on a common benchmark set by using proper data augmentation for just five such networks using a proper coding scheme and a proper voting scheme. The networks have similar architectures (Convolutional Neural Network (CNN): five layers, bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM): three layers followed by a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) processing step). The approach assumes differently-scaled input images and different feature map sizes. Two datasets are used for evaluation of the performance of our algorithm: A standard benchmark RIMES dataset (French), and a historical handwritten dataset KdK (Dutch). Final performance obtained for the word-recognition test of RIMES was 96.6%, a clear improvement over other state-of-the-art approaches. On the KdK dataset, our approach also shows good results. The proposed approach is deployed in the Monk search engine for historical-handwriting collections.