Networks for pattern recognition problems?

[Gale Martin]

I do handwriting recognition with backprop nets and have anecdotal evidence
that the nets do better than the systems developed by some of the research
groups we work with.  The problem with such comparisons is that the success
of the recognition systems depend on the expertise of the developers.  There
will never be a definitive study.

However, I've come to believe that such accuracy comparisons miss the point.
Traditional recognition technologies usually involve alot of hand-crafting
(e.g., selecting features) that you can avoid by using backprop nets.  For
example, I can feed a net with "close to" raw inputs and the net learns 
to segment it into characters, extract features, and classify the characters.
You may be able to do this with traditional techniques, but it will take alot
longer.  Extending the work to different character sets becomes prohibitive;
whereas it is a simple task with a net.

Gale Martin
MCC
Austin, TX