Cursive Character Challenge: a New Database for Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition

Cursive character recognition is a challenging task due to high variability and intrinsic ambiguity of cursive letters. This paper presents \emph{C-Cube} (Cursive Character Challenge), a new public-domain cursive character database. \emph{C-Cube} contains 57293 cursive characters manually extracted from cursive handwritten words, including both upper and lower case versions of each letter. The database can be downoloaded from the web and it provides predefined experimental protocols in order to compare rigorously the results obtained by different researchers.