An Intelligent-Detection Network for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

Abstract: The use of artificial intelligence technology in education is growing rapidly, with increasing attention being paid to handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) by researchers. However, many existing methods for HMER may fail to accurately read formulas with complex structures, as the attention results can be inaccurate due to illegible handwriting or large variations in writing styles. Our proposed Intelligent-Detection Network (IDN) for HMER differs from traditional encoder-decoder methods by utilizing object detection techniques. Specifically, we have developed an enhanced YOLOv7 network that can accurately detect both digital and symbolic objects. The detection results are then integrated into the bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) and the baseline symbol relationship tree (BSRT) to determine the relationships between symbols and numbers. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms those encoder-decoder networks in recognizing complex handwritten mathematical expressions. This is due to the precise detection of symbols and numbers. Our research has the potential to make valuable contributions to the field of HMER. This could be applied in various practical scenarios, such as assignment grading in schools and information entry of paper documents.