Character Recognition Digit Recognition Pattern Recognition Spatiotemporal Neural Networks Modular Networks Segmentation Problem

We describe an alternate approach to visual recognition of handwritten words, wherein an image is converted into a spatio-temporal signal by scanning it in one or more directions, and processed by a suitable connectionist network. The scheme offers several attractive features including shift-invariance, explication of local spatial geometry along the scan direction, a significant reduction in the number of free parameters, the ability to process arbitrarily long images along the scan direction, and a natural framework for dealing with the segmentation/recognition dilemma. Other salient features of the work include the use of a modular and structured approach for network construction and the integration of connectionist components with a procedural component to exploit the complementary strengths of both techniques. The system consists of two connectionist components and a procedural controller. One network concurrently makes recognition and segmentation hypotheses, and another performs refined recognition...