Preprint: Recognizing Handprinted Digit Strings

[Thomas Fontaine]

************** PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD TO OTHER NEWSGROUPS *************

The following paper, to be presented at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting
of the Cognitive Science Society (June 1993), has been placed in the
neuroprose archives at Ohio State University:


	   RECOGNIZING HANDPRINTED DIGIT STRINGS: A HYBRID
		  CONNECTIONIST/PROCEDURAL APPROACH

		 Thomas Fontaine and Lokendra Shastri

	     Computer and Information Science Department
			200 South 33rd Street
		      University of Pennsylvania
		     Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389

We describe an alternative approach to handprinted word recognition
using a hybrid of procedural and connectionist techniques.  We utilize
two connectionist components: one to concurrently make recognition and
segmentation hypotheses, and another to perform refined recognition of
segmented characters.  Both networks are governed by a procedural
controller which incorporates systematic domain knowledge and
procedural algorithms to guide recognition.

We employ an approach wherein an image is processed over time by a
spatiotemporal connectionist network.  The scheme offers several
attractive features including shift-invariance and retention of local
spatial relationships along the dimension being temporalized, a
reduction in the number of free parameters, and the ability to process
arbitrarily long images.

Recognition results on a set of real-world isolated ZIP code digits
are comparable to the best reported to date, with a 96.0\% recognition
rate and a rate of 99.0\% when 9.5\% of the images are rejected.}


***************** How to obtain a copy of the report *****************

I'm sorry, but hardcopies are not available.

To obtain via anonymous ftp:

unix> ftp archive.cis.ohio-state.edu (or 128.146.8.52)
Name: anonymous
Password: neuron
ftp> cd pub/neuroprose
ftp> binary
ftp> get fontaine.wordrec.ps.Z
ftp> quit
unix> uncompress fontaine.wordrec.ps.Z
unix> lpr fontaine.wordrec.ps (or however you print Postscript)