The Polynomial Method Augmented by Supervised Training for Hand-Printed Character Recognition

Abstract

We present a pattern recognition algorithm for hand-printed characters, based on a combination of the classical least squares method and a neural-network-type supervised training algorithm. Characters are mapped, nonlinearly, to feature vectors using selected quadratic polynomials of the given pixels. We use a method for extracting an equidistributed subsample of all possible quadratic features. This method creates pattern classifiers with accuracy competitive to feed-forward systems trained using back propagation; however back propagation training takes longer by a factor of ten to fifty. (This makes our system particularly attractive for experimentation with other forms of feature representation, other character sets, etc.) The resulting classifier runs much faster in use than the back propagation trained systems, because all arithmetic is done using bit and integer operations. Background The augmented polynomial method is a system for classification of hand printed characters and..