Offline Handwritten Text Recognition: A Systematic Literature Review with Comparative Study of Techniques

Abstract

Offline Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is required for practical applications such as the recognition of old documents, students' study material, postal code recognition for letter delivery, recognition of entrance examination forms or admission form assessment, optical mark recognition (OMR), and recognition of medical prescriptions, which depend on reliable models. This systematic literature review (SLR) examines several technologies used in offline HTR, including machine_learning and optimization methods. This study selected a sample of 60 research papers, written in English and published between 2016 and 2026, from the Scopus database. Of these, 36 were Articles, chosen using appropriate inclusion-exclusion criteria, to analyze offline handwritten text recognition approaches.