Methods for adaptive combination of classifiers with application to recognition of handwritten characters

This paper discusses two techniques for improving the recognition accuracy for online handwritten character recognition: committee classification and adaptation to the user. Combining classifiers is a common method for improving recognition performance. Improvements are possible because the member classifiers may make different errors. Much variation exists in handwritten characters, and adaptation is one feasible way of dealing with such variation. Even though adaptation is usually performed for single classifiers, it is also possible to use adaptive committees. Some novel adaptive committee structures, namely, the dynamically expanding context (DEC), modified current best learning (MCBL), and class-confidence critic combination (CCCC), are presented and evaluated. They are shown to be able to improve on their member classifiers, with CCCC offering the best performance. Also, the effect of having either more or less diverse sets of member classifiers is considered.Received: 17 September 2002, Accepted: 22 October 2002, Published online: 4 July 2003