Abstract: Character and handwriting recognition is one of the most difficult problems of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. Unlike the machine generated character, which is uniform throughout a document and often uniform between machines, each human being has a unique style of writing characters. With the infinite number of ways to record a character, it is a wonder that a person can understand his own script, let alone the script of another. Training a computer to recognize human-produced characters is a tremendous task in which researchers are just beginning to achieve some success. Primarily these methods rely on the use of algorithms to determine the similarities of two characters. Neural networks are an alternative technique now being explored. Four separate methods will be discussed in this paper. The first involves normalization, skeletonization, and feature extraction of a handwritten digit before application to a neural network for classification. The second simply applies a normalized digit to the neural net's input, and the network performs a 2-dimensional convolution on it in order to classify the digit. The third method involves a hierarchical network. The final technique incorporates time information into the system while using simple preprocessing and a small number of parameters. Their advantages and disadvantages are compared and discussed.!11
展开▼
