Syntactic neural network for character recognition
Viktor A. Jaravine · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
This article presents a synergism of syntactic 2-D parsing of images and multilayered, feed- forward network techniques. This approach makes it possible to build a written text reading system with absolute recognition rate for unambiguous text strings. The Syntactic Neural Network (SNN) is created during image parsing process by capturing the higher order statistical structure in the ensemble of input image examples. Acquired knowledge is stored in the form of hierarchical image elements dictionary and syntactic network. The number of hidden layers and neuron units is not fixed and is determined by the structural complexity of the teaching set. A proposed syntactic neuron differs from conventional numerical neuron by its symbolic input/output and usage of the dictionary for determining the output. This approach guarantees exact recognition of an image that is a combinatorial variation of the images from the training set. The system is taught to generalize and to make stochastic parsing of distorted and shifted patterns. The generalizations enables the system to perform continuous incremental optimization of its work. New image data learned by SNN doesn''t interfere with previously stored knowledge, thus leading to unlimited storage capacity of the network.