CENTERED-OBJECT INTEGRATED SEGMENTATION AND RECOGNITION OF OVERLAPPING HANDPRINTED CHARACTERS

Visual object recognition is often conceived of as a final step in a visual processing system. First, physical information in the raw image is used to isolate and enhance to-be-recognized clumps and then each of the resulting preprocessed representations is fed into the recognizer. This general conception fails when there are no reliable physical cues for isolating the objects, such as when objects overlap. This paper describes an approach, called centered object integrated segmentation and recognition (COISR), for integrating object segmentation and recognition within a single neural network. The application is handprinted character recognition. The approach uses a backpropagation network that scans a field of characters and is trained to recognize whether it is centered over a single character or between characters. When it is centered over a character, the net classifies the character. The approach is tested on a dataset of handprinted digits and high accuracy rates are reported.