  Handwritten mathematical expression recognition is a challenging problem due
to the complicated two-dimensional structures, ambiguous handwriting input and
variant scales of handwritten math symbols. To settle this problem, we utilize
the attention based encoder-decoder model that recognizes mathematical
expression images from two-dimensional layouts to one-dimensional LaTeX
strings. We improve the encoder by employing densely connected convolutional
networks as they can strengthen feature extraction and facilitate gradient
propagation especially on a small training set. We also present a novel
multi-scale attention model which is employed to deal with the recognition of
math symbols in different scales and save the fine-grained details that will be
dropped by pooling operations. Validated on the CROHME competition task, the
proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with an
expression recognition accuracy of 52.8% on CROHME 2014 and 50.1% on CROHME
2016, by only using the official training dataset.
