Integration of traditional imaging, expert systems, and neural network techniques for enhanced recognition of handwritten information

Includes bibliographical references (p. 33-37).Research supported by the I.F.S.R.C. at M.I.T.Amar Gupta, John Riordan, Evelyn Roman

Text Baseline Detection, a single page trained system

[EN] Nowadays, there are a lot of page images available and the scanning process is quite well resolved and can be done industrially. On the other hand, HTR systems can only deal with single text line images. Segmenting pages into single text line images is a very expensive process which has traditionally been done manually. This is a bottleneck which is holding back any massive industrial document processing. A baseline detection method will be presented here'. The initial problem is reformulated as a clustering problem over a set of interest points. Its design aim is to be fast and to resist the noise artifacts that usually appear in historical manuscripts: variable interline spacing, the overlapping and touching of words in adjacent lines, humidity spots, etc. Results show that this system can be used to massively detect where the text lines are in pages. Highlight: This system reached second place in the ICDAR 2017 Competition on Baseline Detection (see Table 1). (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work was partially supported by the project Carabela (PR[17]_HUM_D4_0059), sponsored by the programme "Ayudas a Equipos de Investigacion en Humanidades Digitales" of the BBVA Foundacion.Pastor Gadea, M. (2019). Text Baseline Detection, a single page trained system. Pattern Recognition. 94:149-161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2019.05.031S1491619

Visual pattern recognition using neural networks

Neural networks have been widely studied in a number of fields, such as neural architectures, neurobiology, statistics of neural network and pattern classification. In the field of pattern classification, neural network models are applied on numerous applications, for instance, character recognition, speech recognition, and object recognition. Among these, character recognition is commonly used to illustrate the feature and classification characteristics of neural networks. In this dissertation, the theoretical foundations of artificial neural networks are first reviewed and existing neural models are studied. The Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) model is improved to achieve more reasonable classification results. Experiments in applying the improved model to image enhancement and printed character recognition are discussed and analyzed. We also study the theoretical foundation of Neocognitron in terms of feature extraction, convergence in training, and shift invariance. We investigate the use of multilayered perceptrons with recurrent connections as the general purpose modules for image operations in parallel architectures. The networks are trained to carry out classification rules in image transformation. The training patterns can be derived from user-defmed transformations or from loading the pair of a sample image and its target image when the prior knowledge of transformations is unknown. Applications of our model include image smoothing, enhancement, edge detection, noise removal, morphological operations, image filtering, etc. With a number of stages stacked up together we are able to apply a series of operations on the image. That is, by providing various sets of training patterns the system can adapt itself to the concatenated transformation. We also discuss and experiment in applying existing neural models, such as multilayered perceptron, to realize morphological operations and other commonly used imaging operations. Some new neural architectures and training algorithms for the implementation of morphological operations are designed and analyzed. The algorithms are proven correct and efficient. The proposed morphological neural architectures are applied to construct the feature extraction module of a personal handwritten character recognition system. The system was trained and tested with scanned image of handwritten characters. The feasibility and efficiency are discussed along with the experimental results

Clustering by compression

We present a new method for clustering based on compression. The method doesn't use subject-specific features or background knowledge, and works as follows: First, we determine a universal similarity distance, the normalized compression distance or NCD, computed from the lengths of compressed data files (singly and in pairwise concatenation). Second, we apply a hierarchical clustering method. The NCD is universal in that it is not restricted to a specific application area, and works across application area boundaries. A theoretical precursor, the normalized information distance, co-developed by one of the authors, is provably optimal but uses the non-computable notion of Kolmogorov complexity. We propose precise notions of similarity metric, normal compressor, and show that the NCD based on a normal compressor is a similarity metric that approximates universality. To extract a hierarchy of clusters from the distance matrix, we determine a dendrogram (binary tree) by a new quartet method and a fast heuristic to implement it. The method is implemented and available as public software, and is robust under choice of different compressors. To substantiate our claims of universality and robustness, we report evidence of successful application in areas as diverse as genomics, virology, languages, literature, music, handwritten digits, astronomy, and combinations of objects from completely different domains, using statistical, dictionary, and block sorting compressors. In genomics we presented new evidence for major questions in Mammalian evolution, based on whole-mitochondrial genomic analysis: the Eutherian orders and the Marsupionta hypothesis against the Theria hypothesis.Comment: LaTeX, 27 pages, 20 figure

Feature Extraction Methods for Character Recognition

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Deep rule-based classifier with human-level performance and characteristics

In this paper, a new type of multilayer rule-based classifier is proposed and applied to image classification problems. The proposed approach is entirely data-driven and fully automatic. It is generic and can be applied to various classification and prediction problems, but in this paper we focus on image processing, in particular. The core of the classifier is a fully interpretable, understandable, self-organised set of IF…THEN… fuzzy rules based on the prototypes autonomously identified by using a one-pass type training process. The classifier can self-evolve and be updated continuously without a full retraining. Due to the prototype-based nature, it is non-parametric; its training process is non-iterative, highly parallelizable and computationally efficient. At the same time, the proposed approach is able to achieve very high classification accuracy on various benchmark datasets surpassing most of the published methods, be comparable with the human abilities. In addition, it can start classification from the first image of each class in the same way as humans do, which makes the proposed classifier suitable for real-time applications. Numerical examples of benchmark image processing demonstrate the merits of the proposed approach

Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.Comment: In press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Open call for commentary proposals (until Nov. 22, 2016). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/information/calls-for-commentary/open-calls-for-commentar