Events Calendar

NL Seminar-LSTM's for OCR

Speaker: Stephen Rawls and Huaigu Cao , USC/ISI

Talk Title: LSTM's for OCR

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: We present ongoing research into OCR for both machine print and handwriting recognition. We utilize a neural network along with LSTM's to perform OCR directly from pixel intensity. We are exploring a few novel improvements, including using a CNN for feature extraction prior to the LSTM, and combining reinforcement learning into our training to directly optimize word error rate in our test-time decoding procedure, which utilizes a (non-differentiable) language-model based decoding of the LSTM output. Finally, we present the design of the OCR system we used to win a pilot project with the US Census for recognizing handwritten first and last names.


Biography: Stephen Rawls is a research programmer and a PhD student at USC/ISI advised by Dr. Prem Natarajan. He works in the Computer Vision group at ISI on face recognition and OCR, among other projects

Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/