Where to start Handwritten Recognition using Neural Network?

Zeck picture Zeck · Dec 28, 2009 · Viewed 16.6k times · Source

I've been trying to learn about Neural Networks for a while now, and I can understand some basic tutorials online. Now i want to develop online handwritten recognition using Neural Network. So i haven't any idea where to start? And i need a very good instruction. In finally i'm java programmer.

What do you suggest I do?

Answer

Gregory Pakosz picture Gregory Pakosz · Dec 28, 2009

Start simple with character recognition on the Unipen database.

You will need to extract pertinent features out of raw trajectory data in order to form what's commonly called a "feature vector". For instance you could resample the data using an interpolation scheme to end up with n tuples, each tuple containing information such as:

  • position
  • orientation
  • velocity
  • acceleration
  • curvature
  • etc

Once you have a fixed size feature vector, you use it as the input to your neural network. Try MLP networks for a start.

You will have to experiment in order to decide which features are best.

If you need to get started on extracting features from Ink data, have a look at HP's Lipi Toolkit (note that their recognizers don't use neural networks though).

You can also have a look at this 15 Steps to Implement a Neural Network tutorial.