Reducing Errors in Computer Recognition of Handwritten Material

September 22, 2004
Ching Y. Suen | Concordia University

Research activities at our research centre will be described, including handwriting recognition, OCR and legibility of printfonts. After that, this talk will focus on methods of reducing errors in handwriting recognition, covering the following topics:

Handwriting education and styles
Preprocessing techniques and recognition algorithms
Shape analysis and selection of representative models
Choice of multiple classifiers, co-operation and combination procedures, serial and parallel operations
Distance measurements and decision analysis, recognition and rejection trade-offs
Verification of detailed and distinctive features
Systematic steps towards an error-free recognition system

Recent CENPARMI results will be illustrated.

Speaker Details

Ching Y. Suen received an M.Sc.(Eng.) degree from the University of Hong Kong and a Ph.D. degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada. In 1972, he joined the Department of Computer Science of Concordia University where he became Professor in 1979 and served as Chairman from 1980 to 1984, and as Associate Dean for Research of the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science from 1993 to 1997. He has guided/hosted 65 visiting scientists and professors, and supervised 60 doctoral and master’s graduates. Currently he holds the distinguished Concordia Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition, and is the Director of CENPARMI, the Centre for PR & MI.Prof. Suen is the author/editor of 11 books and more than 350 papers on subjects ranging from computer vision and handwriting recognition, to expert systems and computational linguistics. He is the founder of “The International Journal of Computer Processing of Oriental Languages” and served as its first Editor-in-Chief for 10 years. Presently he is an Associate Editor of several journals related to pattern recognition.A Fellow of the IEEE, IAPR, and the Academy of Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada, he has served several professional societies as President, Vice-President, or Governor. He is also the founder and chair of several conference series including ICDAR, IWFHR, and VI. He was the General Chair of numerous international conferences, including the International Conference on Computer Processing of Chinese and Oriental Languages in August 1988 held in Toronto, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition held in Montreal in August 1995, and the International Conference on Pattern Recognition held in Quebec City in August 2002.Dr. Suen is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ITAC/NSERC Award (Information Technology Association of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) in 1992 and the Concordia “Research Fellow” award in 1998.