Build a Handwritten Text Recognition System using TensorFlow

Offline Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems transcribe text contained in scanned images into digital text, an example is shown in Figure 1. We will build a Neural Network (NN) which is trained on word-images from the IAM dataset. As the input layer (and therefore also all the other layers) can be kept small for word-images, NN-training is feasible on the CPU (of course, a GPU would be better). This implementation is the bare minimum that is needed for HTR using TF. We use a NN for our task.