Behaviour-Based Clustering of Neural Networks

The field of off-line optical character recognition (OCR) has been a topic of intensive research for many years (Bozinovic, 1989; Bunke, 2003; Plamondon, 2000; Toselli, 2004). One of the first steps in the classical architecture of a text recognizer is preprocessing, where noise reduction and normalization take place. Many systems do not require a binarization step, so the images are maintained in gray-level quality. Document enhancement not only influences the overall performance of OCR systems, but it can also significantly improve document readability for human readers. In many cases, the noise of document images is heterogeneous, and a technique fitted for one type of noise may not be valid for the overall set of documents. One possible solution to this problem is to use several filters or techniques and to provide a classifier to select the appropriate one. Neural networks have been used for document enhancement (see (Egmont-Petersen, 2002) for a review of image processing with neural networks). One advantage of neural network filters for image enhancement and denoising is that a different neural filter can be automatically trained for each type of noise. This work proposes the clustering of neural network filters to avoid having to label training data and to reduce the number of filters needed by the enhancement system. An agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm of supervised classifiers is proposed to do this. The technique has been applied to filter out the background noise from an office (coffee stains and footprints on documents, folded sheets with degraded printed text, etc.). BACKGROUND