2016 12th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems
Named Entity Recognition from Unstructured Handwritten Document Images
Chandranath Adak∗ , Bidyut B. Chaudhuri† , Michael Blumenstein∗
∗ School of ICT, Griffith University, Gold Coast-4222, Australia
† CVPR Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata-700108, India
chandranath.adak@griffithuni.edu.au
Abstract—Named entity recognition is an important topic in
the field of natural language processing, whereas in document
image processing, such recognition is quite challenging without
employing any linguistic knowledge. In this paper we propose
an approach to detect named entities (NEs) directly from
offline handwritten unstructured document images without
explicit character/word recognition, and with very little aid
from natural language and script rules. At the preprocessing
stage, the document image is binarized, and then the text is
segmented into words. The slant/skew/baseline corrections of
the words are also performed. After preprocessing, the words
are sent for NE recognition. We analyze the structural and
positional characteristics of NEs and extract some relevant
features from the word image. Then the BLSTM neural
network is used for NE recognition. Our system also contains
a post-processing stage to reduce the true NE rejection rate.
The proposed approach produces encouraging results on both
historical and modern document images, including those from
an Australian archive, which are reported here for the very
first time.
Keywords: BLSTM neural network, Document image anal-
ysis, Dual layer bagging, Information retrieval, Named entity
recognition.
1. Introduction
A document may contain text as well as non-texts such
as maps, drawings, photographic images etc. For hand-
written documents, some special types of non-text (e.g.,
doodles, struck-out words, annotations etc.) may also be
there. Sometimes a document may be a mixture (hybrid)
of printed and handwritten text where artifacts from both
groups may exist.
Important studies have been undertaken on layout anal-
ysis, printed/handwritten text separation and text/non-text
segregation in documents. Moreover, better accuracy with
higher efficiency has been achieved on preprocessing mod-
ules such as text-line identification, word/character segmen-
tation, as well as Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
engines.
On degraded documents, where OCR engines do not
work well, keyword spotting can play a remarkable role in
identifying important words. Also, it may be necessary to
978-1-5090-1792-8/16 $31.00 © 2016 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/DAS.2016.15
find some keywords, e.g., date-field, named-entity, numeric
value, currency, time information etc. from the document
image. These are useful in document indexing/retrieval with-
out reading the full text in a document image.
In this paper, we strive to identify word image that
represent a Named Entity (NE). An NE usually refers to
some name-of-things. These entities may be living or non-
living, such as a person, place, company, organic/inorganic
chemical compound, currency, time, month and so on.
Named Entity Recognition (NER) [1] has been a popular
topic in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP)
and Information Retrieval (IR) for the last two decades. A
detailed survey on NER research in natural language text is
reported in [2]. However, work on NE identification from
document images is rare. One approach of NER from a
document image was attempted by Zhu et al. [3] who con-
sidered semi-structured and unstructured printed documents
of a special type, namely “automated expense reimburse-
ment”. In their method, a Conditional Random Field (CRF)
framework with some rich page layout features was used.
They also employed an OCR engine and recognized the NEs
with assistance from the OCR outputs.
Without character/ word recognition, NE detection from
a document image is very difficult because NLP-based
knowledge can hardly be used in such a situation. How-
ever, such detection is essential where linguistic knowledge
cannot be used due to the poor performance of handwritten
text recognition engines. In this paper, we attempt to fill this
gap by proposing an approach for NE recognition without
doing OCR on the document image. We find some features
by analyzing the structural and positional characteristics of
NE and feed them to a BLSTM neural network for NE
recognition. Our method can process unstructured handwrit-
ten offline historical and contemporary English documents.
We have not found any published work on NE recognition
directly from document images, which is similar to the one
described here.
The present problem is completely different from the
classical keyword spotting [4] problem. In keyword spotting,
a template (of a keyword) is given to find its matches in a
document image. But in our proposed work, no template is
provided at all. We just use some structural and positional
characteristics of an NE for its identification. The rest of
the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes our
proposed method in detail. The results and evaluation of the
375
system are provided in Section 3. Then Section 4 concludes
the paper.
2. Proposed Method
In this section, we elaborate on our method for Named
Entity (NE) recognition. We are given an unstructured doc-
ument image I and our aim is to identify the NE from this
image. Our scheme consists of several stages, as discussed
below in detail.
2.1. Binarization
A document image I(r, c), where r and c denote row and
column index respectively, may contain noise and may be
degraded in quality due to aging, insect perforations etc. So,
proper binarization is required to analyze the writing strokes.
We find the binarization technique of Ntirogiannis et al. [5]
suitable for our purposes on historical documents. A fusion
of local and global adaptive binarization with background
estimation is used there. The superiority of this method,
compared to some other off-the-shelf and recent binarization
algorithms, is also shown in [5]. Moreover, we modify this
method slightly as per our requirements. In [5], very small
components are all rejected as noise, but we retain them and
process further to find punctuation marks (in Section 2.4.2).
For modern and good quality documents, Otsu’s binarization
[6] method is employed.
2.2. Word Segmentation
Since our aim is to find the NEs which consist of
words, we have to segment individual words. We use a 2D
Gaussian filter for word segmentation on the image I(r, c).
The standard deviation (σ ) and block size (a × b) for this
filter is chosen automatically by analyzing the connected
components in a text-line. In English script, the words are
arranged horizontally. Hence, the block size is chosen to
be wider in length than height. After blurring, an adaptive
threshold is used for binarization and for returning the
(word) segmented image.
2.3. Slant / Skew / Baseline Correction
In English script, an NE generally starts with an upper-
case character. An upper-case character is normally more
elongated in the vertical direction than lower-case ones. This
is a useful property, applied in our approach. However, we
may get erroneous results if the characters are slanted. So,
slant correction is necessary.
For slant correction of a word, we use the algorithm
presented in [7]. This algorithm is based on a vertical
projection profile and employs the Wigner-Ville distribution
[8]. This method fits well for our purpose.
The skew and baseline offsets [9] are also detected and
corrected.
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2.4. Characteristics of Named Entities
Detection of NE, without any explicit character/word
recognition, is challenging because of the lack of linguistic
knowledge. The only things available are the patterns of the
character strokes; those also vary with individual writers. We
analyze some characteristics of NE from the perspective of
image and pattern analysis.
2.4.1. Structural Characteristics.
An NE is likely to start with a capital (i.e. upper-case)
letter in English script. It is a useful indicator for NE
identification. For example, the difference between “beauty”
(noun of beautiful) and “Beauty” (may refer to a person’s
name) can be identified only by the first capital letter in the
word image. The height of a capital letter is normally more
than that of small (i.e. lower-case) letters.
To detect a capital letter, we partition a word image into
three zones (upper, middle and lower) by two imaginary
lines called upper and lower baselines. These baselines are
obtained by simple horizontal histogram projections. Some
details of the approach can be found in [9]. The maximum
number of object (ink) pixels generally lies in the middle
zone, where the horizontal histogram profile reaches the
global maximum. This middle zone is actually the main
body of a word.
An upper-case character usually covers the upper and
middle zones. A capital letter is sometimes wider than a
lower-case letter. In the upper projection profile (of a word)
the maximum height and width is likely to be found near
the beginning (left), if the word starts with a capital letter.
Some distinct characteristics are also observed in the word
projection profiles, if it starts with a capital letter. More
details on these aspects are provided in Section 2.5.
2.4.2. Positional Characteristics.
An NE may be positioned at different places of a sen-
tence. It can be broadly categorized in terms of positions: (i)
first position, i.e. first word of the sentence, (ii) last position,
i.e. last word of the sentence and (iii) middle position, i.e.
anywhere except (i) and (ii).
A sentence often ends with punctuation marks such as
a full stop (.), question mark (?), exclamation mark (!) etc.
which are detected to isolate a sentence from the document
image. We note that there is no character in the English
alphabet which has a dot-like component in its lower zone.
But question marks and exclamation marks have dots in their
lower zone. Full stop can be easily detected by finding a dot-
like component near the border between middle and/or lower
zone. Such punctuation marks signal the end of a sentence
and the beginning of the next sentence. This sentence-end-
marking result may be erroneous for degraded and noisy
documents, as well as for documents having false end-
markers due to individual handwriting habits.
If an NE is positioned in the middle or last part of a
sentence, then the first character of the word is in upper-
case. So, by analyzing the position, we can conclude that the
middle and last positioned words are generally NEs when
the first character is a capital letter. Some exceptions are
there, which we handle during post-processing.
Now, the difficulty arises with the first positional NE,
since any first positional word starts with a capital letter. To
know how frequently they occur, we performed positional
occurrence analysis of NEs in an English sentence. For
this purpose, we took 300 articles (100 newspapers, 100
story books and 100 online articles). Among these 10
articles on various topics were chosen from 10 English
newspapers having the highest circulation in 10 countries.
Also, 10 pages from each of the 10 different English story
books and novels of distinct writers from various countries
were selected. Moreover, 100 online articles on dissimilar
topics were chosen from different websites (e.g. various
blogs, Wikipedia pages etc.). After processing these 300
articles by the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer [1], we
found that per article at most 16.66% (minimum: 0%)
of NEs can reside in the first position of a sentence.
2.5. Feature Extraction
The features used in our method of detecting NE words
are described below. All features are normalized in the range
[0, 1].
2.5.1. Object Pixel Distribution.
These types of features are based on the distribution
of the foreground object (ink) pixels throughout the word
image.
We consider a vertical sliding window of size h × 1,
where ‘h’ is the height of the word bounding-box. This
window is moved from left to right over a word. Then we
calculate the weight (f1 ), center of gravity (f2 ) and 2nd -
order moment (f3 ) of the window as [9]. Sometimes, f1 is
called a vertical projection profile.

h

On average, the first positional occurrence of an NE is f1 (c) = p(r, c) (1)

only 7.01% (newspaperavg. : 8.33%, story-bookavg. : 5.78%, r=1

online-articleavg. : 6.92%). So, the confusion may arise only

1
h
on these 7.01% of NEs. We deal with such cases later in f2 (c) = r.p(r, c) (2)
the post-processing stage. h r=1

1  2
h
Obtaining guidance from the SMART [10] project, we
categorized four special classes of frequently occurring f3 (c) = r .p(r, c) (3)
h2 r=1
words (in the English literature) with respect to structures
and various positions in a sentence. These classes are Here p(r, c) is the binary image of I(r, c) obtained in Section
described below. 2.1 and p(r, c) can take on values 0 or 1, where 1 is the
i) Wh-word class: This class contains Wh-question words foreground pixel.
starting with characters “Wh” and generally positioned at Additionally, we employ a horizontal sliding window of
the beginning of a sentence. e.g. Why, Who, Whom, What, size 1×w, where ‘w’ is the width of the word bounding-box,
When, Where, Which, Whose etc. and calculate the features f4 , f5 and f6 , as

ii) Th-word class: Words starting with “Th”/“th” belong 

w
f4 (r) = p(r, c) (4)
to this class and are usually positioned at the beginning
c=1
(first) and middle of a sentence. At the first position ‘T’ is
1 
in upper-case, otherwise it is in lower-case (‘t’). e.g. The, w

This, That, These, Those, Thank etc. f5 (r) = c.p(r, c) (5)

iii) Small-width word class: This class contains some words
with one or two characters, e.g. I, A, An, Am, At, As, Be,
We, He, Hi, It, If, Is, Of, On, No, To, In, Dr, Mr, Ms, Mx,
Jr, Sr, Br, Sr, Fr, Lt, Mt etc.
iv) All-caps word class: Sometimes, all characters
of a word are in capital letters. It is usually in the
abbreviation/acronym form of multiple words, Roman
numerals etc. e.g. OCR, USD, UAE, XXI etc.
Some salutation (or title) words with small width, e.g.
Mr, Ms, Mx, Md, Dr, Pt, Sk, St, Mrs, Esq, Adv, Sir, Sri
etc. followed by (a dot ‘.’ sometimes, and) another word
beginning with a capital letter is a sign of NE with high
confidence. Also, two or more consecutive words beginning
with a capital letter have a higher possibility of being an
NE, e.g. Sir Isaac Newton, John F. Kennedy, Victor Dalby
Lord Jr., Queen Elizabeth II etc.
w c=1
1  2
w
f6 (r) = c .p(r, c) (6)
w2 c=1
2.5.2. Profile Features.
The word-profile features used in our method are de-
scribed as follows.
We choose the upper contour profile (f7 ) [11] of a
word, which is the distance from the upper boundary of the
bounding-box to the vertically closest object pixel for each
column. Similarly, the lower contour profile (f8 ) is obtained
on the lower boundary, and used as a feature.
Also, crossing count of the object (black ink) and non-
object (white) pixel for each column is considered as a fea-
ture. Crossing count is usually half of the (blackto white +
whiteto black) transition count. It is called the vertical

377
black-white transition (f9 ) [9]. Additionally, we compute
horizontal black-white transitions (f10 ) of a word.
Furthermore, a vertical run-length histogram (f11 ) and
a horizontal run-length histogram (f12 ) are obtained. The
run-length is calculated as the sum of consecutive object
pixels in the vertical/horizontal direction.
2.5.3. Special Weighted Features.
In addition to the above twelve features, two weighted
features described below are employed.
On the upper projection profile of a word image, we
count the transition of peaks and valleys. Since an NE
generally starts with a capital letter, we give some weight on
the peak-valley transition count. Let, n1 , n2 and n3 be the
count of peak-valley transitions on the left 1/3rd , middle
1/3rd and right 1/3rd portion (in x-direction), respectively,
of the upper projection profile. This may be used as a feature
(f13 ).
f13 = k1 .n1 + k2 .n2 + k3 .n3 (7)
Here, k1 , k2 and k3 are the weight factors. By testing on a
training dataset, we obtained optimum results with k1 = 0.8,
k2 = 0.1 and k3 = 0.1 .
On the horizontal projection profile (f4 ), we mark the
upper, middle and lower zones, as described in Section 2.4.1.
Since the capital letters normally reside in the upper and
middle zone, we apply some weights to this profile feature
and obtain f14 .
w
3   2w
3 
 
f14 = k4 . p(r, c) + k5 . p(r, c) + k6 .
c=1 c> w
3 
(8)
Here, ‘w’ is the width of a word. The weight factors k4 =
0.6, k5 = 0.3 and k6 = 0.1 perform well for this problem.
2.6. Neural Network-based Classification
Among a few standard classifiers, we have found that
a Neural Network (NN) yields highest accuracy for our
problem. A detailed survey on NN-based classification is
reported in [12]. Of the various NN classifiers, we use
“Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory”(BLSTM) neural
network for our problem. Since the BLSTM-NN has shown
promising results in other handwriting analysis/ recognition
problems [13], we have chosen this classifier. Also, as shown
in [14], BLSTM-NN is time efficient in comparison with
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) for shape matching.
In our approach, we have employed the above 14 fea-
tures. To feed into the BLSTM-NN, in general, the features
are categorized into 3 types: (i) vertical feature set fV : {f1 ,
f2 , f3 , f7 , f8 , f9 , f11 }, (ii) horizontal feature set fH : {f4 ,
f5 , f6 , f10 , f12 } and (iii) special feature set fS : {f13 , f14 }.
With these 3 sets of features (fV , fH and fS ), we employ 3
different BLSTM-NNs (B1 , B2 and B3 , respectively). The
input layer of a BLSTM-NN has d nodes, where ‘d’ is the
number of features. So, B1 , B2 and B3 have 7, 5 and 2
input nodes, respectively. The input nodes are connected
with 2 distinct recurrent hidden layers, one for forward and
another for the backward sequence. The output layer is also
connected with both hidden layers. We primarily wanted
to distinguish NE from non-NE words. Then four add-on
special classes (Wh-word, Th-word, Small-width and All-
caps: described in Section 2.4) are also considered. So, the
total number of classes is K = 2 + 4 = 6. At the output
layer, one extra node is added for a non-word class, such as
noisy components and punctuation marks. Thus, the output
layer (for each of B1 , B2 and B3 ) contains K +1 = 7 nodes.
The details of BLSTM-NN working principles can be found
in [13]. The outputs of B1 , B2 and B3 are joined with a
fusion scheme. Combining such classifiers, called bagging
strategy, is applied for decreasing the error rate. The setup
of BLSTM-NN as the classifier for our problem is described
in Section 3.2.
2.7. Post-processing
After classification, we check the positional occurrence
(as described in Section 2.4.2) of the marked NEs. Some
non-NEs, including first positional words, may be misclas-
sified as NEs. We check with the special classes (Wh-
word, Th-word, Small-width and All-caps: see Section 2.4)
to separate the non-NEs. In this way, we attempt to reduce
the false acceptance of the first positional non-NE words.
We focus on minimizing the genuine NE rejection rate,
sacrificing higher accuracy. It is more likely that we would

w find a subset of words, and those are most certainly the NEs.
p(r, c) So, we mark some words as potential NEs in this subset with
c> 2w
3 
a degree of confidence [15].
In certain writing, we note that NEs having many oc-
currences are indicative of the writing topic and thus assist
in context analysis. So, we also find the NE-word frequency
count using the above BLSTM-NN to extend our work for
context analysis. Here we employ the strategy of [4], but
use the features presented in Section 2.5.
3. Experimental Results and Discussions
Before discussing the experimental results, we begin
with the description of the dataset used for evaluation of
our scheme.
3.1. Dataset Employed
For our experiments, we used three handwritten offline
datasets: i) George Washington database (GWdb) [16], ii)
Queensland State Archives database (QSAdb) [17], iii) IAM
database (IAMdb) [18].
GWdb and QSAdb are historical text databases. Of
those, the GWdb contains 20 handwritten pages of G.
Washington. We took 66 pages from the QSAdb containing
handwritten text only. Finally, the IAMdb contains recent
data with 1539 handwritten pages written by 657 writers.
378
 For ground-truth generation of the NEs on such pages, a
semi-automatic approach with human-intervention was em-
ployed. In addition, the manuscripts having publicly avail-
able transcripts, were fed into the Stanford Named Entity
Recognizer [1] for generating the ground truth.
(a)
3.2. Results and Evaluation

For training purposes, we consider four different ses-

sions with random selections of 50%, 60%, 70% and 80%
of the dataset to make four different classifiers (C1Bi , C2Bi ,
C3Bi and C4Bi ) for each Bi , i = 1, 2, 3. This is a dual
layer bagging strategy, i.e. bagging inside each bag. The
(b)
classifier outputs (for both of the inside bags: CjBi: j=1,2,3,4
and outside bags: Bi: i=1,2,3 ) are combined using a fusion
strategy: Sum rule over the confidence values for each class
of each classifier. The sum rule is used because it exhibits
better performance over some other fusion strategies such as
the max, min, median, majority vote, product rule [19] etc.
To avoid overfitting, 5-fold cross validation is also used.
We calculate Precision (P ), Recall (R) and F1 -Measure
(F M ) for NE recognition on each document image after
testing on the overall dataset. From the confusion matrix,
True Positive (T P ), False Positive (F P ), True Negative
(T N ) and False Negative (F N ) are obtained. The average
P , R and F M are shown in Table 1.
(c)
TABLE 1. E VALUATION OF NE R ECOGNITION Figure 1. NE identification in document images of (a) GWdb, (b) QSAdb,
(c) IAMdb. Color boxes denote true positive (Red), false negative (Blue)
Database P (%) R (%) FM (%)
and false positive (Green) cases.
GWdb 64.12 89.26 74.62 (Color copy of this paper exhibits a better display of the above Fig.1).
QSAdb 59.33 86.72 70.45
IAMdb 68.42 92.66 78.71
Also, some first positioned words of a sentence can create
Since our aim is to reduce genuine NE rejection, i.e. false acceptance (e.g. in Fig.1.c, the word “But” marked by
minimizing F N , the Recall (R) should be high. The ex- a green box).
perimental results in Table 1 show fairly high recall values, Conversely, an NE starting with a capital letter, having
predicting high sensitivity. a reasonably small width in the upper zone, can be rejected
Table 2 shows the effectiveness of different features (see, falsely (Fig.1.a, blue box containing an NE).
Section 2.5) on experimental results with respect to the F1 - For comparison purposes, we have not found any other
Measure. work on NE recognition, which has been performed without
employing a character/word recognition engine.
TABLE 2. I MPACT OF D IFFERENT F EATURES

F1 -Measure (%) 4. Conclusion

Features
GWdb QSAdb IAMdb
fV : {f1 , f2 , f3 , f7 , f8 , f9 , f11 } 61.58 57.39 64.27 A named entity recognizer for offline handwritten un-
fH : {f4 , f5 , f6 , f10 , f12 } 61.18 59.78 65.16 structured documents, without employing a character/word
fS : {f13 , f14 } 64.60 62.37 67.32 recognizer and a linguistic model, is presented in this paper.
Experiments conducted on two historical datasets and one
From Table.2, it may be observed that special weighted modern handwriting dataset have resulted in an average F1 -
features perform fairly well. Measure of 74.59%. The proposed method is expected to
Our method has the possibility to identify a non-NE as work on some other Latin scripts, where an NE usually
an NE when a person writes a non-NE word starting with a starts with a capital letter. Our method will not work on
capital letter (e.g. in Fig.1.b, the word “Engineer”, marked Abugida (e.g. Devanagari, Bangla etc.) or Logographic (e.g.
in a green box). Conjoined cursive writing may lead to false Chinese, Japanese etc.) script, where the concept of capital
acceptance (see Fig.1.b, the green box containing “I have”). letters does not exist. Our future work will endeavor to
make our system more accurate for English scripts. The
TP TP 2×P ×R
. P = T P +F P
, R= T P +F N
, FM = P +R
present scheme can produce a set of NE-word images (from

379
a document image) only, not its machine-readable output
with the aid of any name-dictionary. This will also be the
scope of our future work.
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