We developed two post-processing strategies utilizing the facts that we have two copies of each scoresheet (both players are required to write the entire game), and we can easily check if a move is valid. Starting with a pretrained network for standard Latin handwriting recognition, we imposed chess-specific restrictions and trained with our Handwritten Chess Scoresheet (HCS) dataset. This is a very time-consuming process, and in this paper we present an alternate workflow of digitizing scoresheets using a BiLSTM network.
During an Over-the-Board (OTB) chess event, all players are required to record their moves strictly by hand, and later the event organizers are required to digitize these sheets for official records.
