INTEGRATED SEGMENTATION AND RECOGNITION THROUGH EXHAUSTIVE SCANS OR LEARNED SACCADIC JUMPS

Abstract

This paper advances two approaches to integrating handwritten character segmentation and recognition within one system, where the underlying function is learned by a backpropagation neural network. Integrated segmentation and recognition is necessary when characters overlap or touch, or when an individual character is broken up. The first approach exhaustively scans a field of characters, effectively creating a possible segmentation at each scan point. A neural net is trained to both identify when its input window is centered over a character, and if it is, to classify the character. This approach is similar to most recently advanced approaches to integrating segmentation and recognition, and has the common flaw of generating too many possible segmentations to be truly efficient. The second approach overcomes this weakness without reducing accuracy by training a neural network to mimic the ballistic and corrective saccades (eye movements) of human vision. A single neural net learns to jump from character to character, making corrective jumps when necessary, and to classify the centered character when properly fixated. The significant aspect of this system is that the neural net learns to both control what is in its input window as well as to recognize what is in the window. High accuracy results are reported for a standard database of handprinted digits for both approaches.