A residual-attention offline handwritten Chinese text recognition based on fully convolutional neural networks

Offline handwritten Chinese text recognition is one of the most challenging tasks in that it involves various writing styles, complex character-touching, and large number of character categories. In this paper, we propose a residual-attention offline handwritten Chinese text recognition based on fully convolutional neural networks, which is segmentation-free handwritten recognition that avoids the impact of incorrect character segmentation. By designing a smart residual attention gate block, our model can help to extract important features, and effectively implement the training of deep convolutional neural networks. Furthermore, we deploy an expansion factor to indicate the trade-off between computing resources for model training and the ability of a gradient to propagate across multiple layers, and make our model training adapt to different computing platforms. Experiments on the CASIA-HWDB and ICDAR-2013 competition dataset show that our method achieves a competitive performance on offline handwritten Chinese text recognition. On the CASIA-HWDB test set, the character-level accurate rate and correct rate achieve 97.32% and 97.90% respectively