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MDA-Network: Mask and Dual Attention Network for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

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Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ChineseCSCW 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1330))

Abstract

Building a system for automatic handwritten mathematical expressions recognition (HMER) has received considerable attention for its extensive applications. However, HMER remains challenging due to its own many characteristics such as the ambiguity of handwritten symbol, the two-dimensional characteristics of expression structure, and a large amount of context information. Inspired by research on machine translation and image caption, we proposed an Encoder-Decoder structure to recognize the handwritten mathematical expression. Encoder based dual attention is used to extract the features of the expression image and attention-decoder achieves symbol recognition and structural analysis. The mask information is added to the input data allows the model to better focus on the region of interest. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, we train the model on the CROHME-2016 train set and use the CROHME-2014 test set as the validation set, the CROHME-2016 test set as the test set. The experimental results show that our method is greatly improved compared with other recognition methods, achieved respectively 47.49% and 45.10% ExpRate in the two test sets.

Supported by Transformation and industrialization demonstration of marine scientific and technological achievements in Xiamen Marine and Fisheries Bureau (No. 18CZB033HJ11).

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Correspondence to Songzhi Su .

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Hu, J., Zhou, P., Liao, S., Li, S., Su, S., Su, S. (2021). MDA-Network: Mask and Dual Attention Network for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition. In: Sun, Y., Liu, D., Liao, H., Fan, H., Gao, L. (eds) Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. ChineseCSCW 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1330. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2540-4_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2540-4_15

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