What are the suitable datasets for an Offline English handwritten OCR application

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oh, yes. i forgot about the digits only

i checked it, but it contains "words" not individual characters

Indeed, the most handwriting-recognition algorithms work on line or word basis (typically using HMMs). I just double-checked my references and most of them use this database, only few papers used characters at all. The only one with segmented english characters I found was the CEDAR database: http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/Databases/ . Please let me know if you find sth else.

but CEDAR is not free :( . any way thanks. i am still searching and , i will let you know if i found

Seems that IAM also has letters: http://www.iam.unibe.ch/fki/databases/iam-graph-database/download-the-iam-graph-database

hi Guanta, yes i checked IAM databases also. but i am not able to construct images from those .GXL files. they have sentence and single word images. so i download them and segment and there by prepared some single characters images. at the moment i can satisfy with them, but i need more :) . thank you very much for considering and for your effort in my problem.

@David Jgones: I think, with the additional graph-datasets given in the link you'll get a huge amount of data.

@Guanta, if we train classifier for words instead of characters, that means the cluster size is much larger, lets say there are 5000 frequently used words, then it will be 5000 clusters, but there are only 72 clusters for charaters + digits. Without so much in-field pratice, is 5000 clusters normal? does that has huge impact to performance?

I think you missunderstand a concept here. It's about images having words, so no real text.

Thanks due, i will check that

hi, did you able to download this ETL6 database. if so let me know how. anyway i got the IAM database. but it has sentence and single word images. so segment them and prepared some character images. but i need more images . thank you very much for considering and your effort my question.

yes i was able to download the ETL6 DB from the link (you might need to register first): https://projects.itri.aist.go.jp/etlcdb/wordpress/?p=139&lang=en you can read the ETL6 images with the help of this page: http://projects.itri.aist.go.jp/etlcdb/util/et2tif.htm.