Meitei Mayek handwriting recognition stops slicing words into characters: whole-word reading cuts synthetic test word errors to 1.57%
Handwritten Meitei Mayek has been recognised one character at a time, yet its most frequent confusions depend on where a character sits in a word. Training words are composed from isolated character images and read whole by a convolutional encoder, a bidirectional LSTM and CTC, giving 0.24% character and 1.57% word error on 5,000 synthetic test words; on 100 unseen real words written on a tablet by one native writer, character error is 2.96% and word error 16.0%.