The A2iA French handwriting recognition system at the Rimes-ICDAR2011 competition

This paper describes the system for the recognition of French handwriting submitted by A2iA to the competition organized at ICDAR2011 using the Rimes database. This system is composed of several recognizers based on three different recognition technologies, combined using a novel combination method. A framework multi-word recognition based on weighted finite state transducers is presented, using an explicit word segmentation, a combination of isolated word recognizers and a language model. The system was tested both for isolated word recognition and for multi-word line recognition and submitted to the RIMES-ICRAR2011 competition. This system outperformed all previously proposed systems on these tasks.