METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR THE SPOTTING OF ARBITRARY WORDS IN HANDWRITTEN DOCUMENTS

A method and system for the spotting of keywords in a handwritten document, the method comprising the steps of inputting an image of the handwritten document, performing word segmentation on the image to obtain segmented words, performing word matching, and outputting the spotted keywords. The word matching itself consisting in the substeps of performing character segmentation on the segmented words, performing character recognition on the segmented characters, performing distance computations on the recognized characters using a Generalized Hidden Markov Model with ergodic topology to identify words based on character models and performing nonkeyword rejection using a classifier based on a combination of Gaussian Mixture Models, Hidden Markov Models and Support Vector Machines.