A system for automatic subcharacter unit and lexicon generation for handwriting recognition comprises a processing unit, a handwriting input device, and a memory wherein a segmentation unit, a subcharacter generation unit, a lexicon unit, and a modeling unit reside. The segmentation unit generates feature vectors corresponding to sample characters. The subcharacter generation unit clusters feature vectors and assigns each feature vector associated with a given cluster an identical label. The lexicon unit constructs a lexical graph for each character in a character set. The modeling unit generates a Hidden Markov Model for each set of identically-labeled feature vectors. After a first set of lexical graphs and Hidden Markov Models have been created, the subcharacter generation unit determines for each feature vector which Hidden Markov Model produces a highest likelihood value. The subcharacter generation unit relabels each feature vector according to the highest likelihood value, after which the lexicon unit and the modeling unit generate a new set of lexical graphs and a new set of Hidden Markov Models, respectively. The feature vector relabeling, lexicon generation, and Hidden Markov Model generation are performed iteratively until a convergence criterion is met. The final set of Hidden Markov Model model parameters provide a set of subcharacter units for handwriting recognition, where the subcharacter units are derived from information inherent in the sample characters themselves.
SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATIC SUBCHARACTER UNIT AND LEXICON GENERATION FOR HANDWRITING RECOGNITION