Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

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

Deep Learning Architectures for Novel Problems

With convolutional neural networks revolutionizing the computer vision field it is important to extend the capabilities of neural-based systems to dynamic and unrestricted data like graphs. Doing so not only expands the applications of such systems, but also provide more insight into improvements to neural-based systems. Currently most implementations of graph neural networks are based on vertex filtering on fixed adjacency matrices. Although important for a lot of applications, vertex filtering restricts the applications to vertex focused graphs and cannot be efficiently extended to edge focused graphs like social networks. Applications of current systems are mostly limited to images and document references. Beyond the graph applications, this work also explored the usage of convolutional neural networks for intelligent character recognition in a novel way. Most systems define Intelligent Character Recognition as either a recurrent classification problem or image classification. This achieves great performance in a limited environment but does not generalize well on real world applications. This work defines intelligent Character Recognition as a segmentation problem which we show to provide many benefits. The goal of this work was to explore alternatives to current graph neural networks implementations as well as exploring new applications of such system. This work also focused on improving Intelligent Character Recognition techniques on isolated words using deep learning techniques. Due to the contrast between these to contributions this documents was divided into Part I focusing on the graph work, and Part II focusing on the intelligent character recognition work

Image-based Text Classification using 2D Convolutional Neural Networks

We propose a new approach to text classification in which we consider the input text as an image and apply 2D Convolutional Neural Networks to learn the local and global semantics of the sentences from the variations of the visual patterns of words. Our approach demonstrates that it is possible to get semantically meaningful features from images with text without using optical character recognition and sequential processing pipelines, techniques that traditional natural language processing algorithms require. To validate our approach, we present results for two applications: text classification and dialog modeling. Using a 2D Convolutional Neural Network, we were able to outperform the state-ofart accuracy results for a Chinese text classification task and achieved promising results for seven English text classification tasks. Furthermore, our approach outperformed the memory networks without match types when using out of vocabulary entities from Task 4 of the bAbI dialog dataset

Diagonal Based Feature Extraction for Handwritten Alphabets Recognition System using Neural Network

An off-line handwritten alphabetical character recognition system using multilayer feed forward neural network is described in the paper. A new method, called, diagonal based feature extraction is introduced for extracting the features of the handwritten alphabets. Fifty data sets, each containing 26 alphabets written by various people, are used for training the neural network and 570 different handwritten alphabetical characters are used for testing. The proposed recognition system performs quite well yielding higher levels of recognition accuracy compared to the systems employing the conventional horizontal and vertical methods of feature extraction. This system will be suitable for converting handwritten documents into structural text form and recognizing handwritten names