http://www.ai.rug.nl/~jpoosten/teaching/hwr/2011/
Period 2b (block 4), 2011
Progress code: KIM.SCHR03
In this course you learn how an automatic handwriting recognizer works. You will make a recognizer yourself and write a scientific report on it. (Have a peek at Assignment 4 to get an impression.)
The handwriting material for this course is historical handwriting from the "Queen's Cabinet" (Kabinet der Koningin) (stored at the Dutch National Archive, Nationaal Archief, Den Haag) as shown in the figure to the right.
Several smaller assignments are steps towards the final assignment and report. Some of the assignments will be tested on a separate (secret) test set; the results will be shown in a live highscore online. You must work in groups of 2–3 persons.
On Tuesday* Prof. dr.
Schomaker first gives a lecture. After that, one or two students give
an oral presentation. This presentation counts for 10% of your final grade.
Send us the outline of your presentation (either copy/pasted from the outline
view of PowerPoint or the draft of your PowerPoint slides themselves) on
the Monday before your presentation, before 13:00.
* Please note that the practical and lecture are reversed in the last week, and
have different rooms.
On Thursday practical sessions supervised by
Jean-Paul van Oosten are
scheduled; you can use these to work on the practical assignments. At least one
computer is available for each group.
Programming is done in either Python, C, C++ or Java, or a combination.
For instance, Python can be used for quickly creating the general framework;
C++ for the low-level procedures.
All deadlines are on Friday, 18:00 (see the table below). You may once extend any deadline with exactly one week.
Grades appear in Nestor. The final grade appears in Progress. There is no exam other than the mentioned assignments.
Re-examination: You may resubmit your final recognizer before July 1st, when you feel you could have done better. However, that is one week before the deadline of the report! If you want a review of an early version of your report, send it in before June 24th.
| Week | Lecture | Student presentation (10%) | Practical | Assignment |
| 17 |
Tue. April 26 Introduction (sheets), determine presentation dates, history of scripts (sheets). |
(none) | Introduction | (none) |
| 18 |
Tue. May 3 Human writing (sheets), human reading (sheets), lxj encoding. |
Jan Willem de Jonge: Human reading Daniel Arias Mutis: Motor Control Handwriting |
(none) | Assignment 1: Preprocessing 5%, deadline May 6 |
| 19 |
Tue. May 10 Features (sheets) |
Ron Snijders, Nino van Hooff: Preprocessing Zetao Chen: Layout analysis |
Work on ass. 2 | Assignment 2: Feature extraction 5%, deadline May 13 Hiscore |
| 20 |
Tue. May 17 Crash course in pattern classification (sheets), classification of handwriting. |
Erik Meuwese: Layout analysis Gijs Slijpen, Mark Scheeve: Pattern Recognition |
Work on ass. 3 | Assignment 3: Classification 5%, deadline May 20 Hiscore |
| 21 | Tue. May 24 Language and context modeling, Hidden Markov Models. |
Allard Naber: Pattern Recognition Harm de Vries, Sander Kelders, Daniel Wedema: Hidden Markov Models in HWR |
Work on ass. 4 | (none) |
| 22 | Tue. May 31 Off-line recognition, preprocessing, segmentation. |
Marko Doornbos, Harry de Boer: Off line HWR Than-le Ha, Sjoerd Hemminga, Jos v.d. Til: Linguistic post-processing |
(none) | (none) |
| 23 | Thu. June 9 Note start-time: 10:00 Team reports |
First lecture hour ..., Jeroen de Groot, Rudy Schoenmaker, Tranh Manh Ke: Off line HWR Second and third lecture hour (t.b.d.): Team reports |
Tue. June 7 Work on ass. 4 |
Assignment 4: Linguistic post-processing 15%, deadline June Hiscore |
| 24 | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) |
| 25 | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) |
| 26 | (none) | (none) | (none) | (none) |
| 27 | (none) | (none) | (none) | Assignment 5: Report 60%, deadline July |
Notes:
Direct your questions to Jean-Paul van Oosten.
Last modified: april 20th, 2011, by Jean-Paul