Handwritten Chinese character recognition by rule-embedded Neocognitron

This paper presents an attempt to integrate neural computation with a domain knowledge technique to resolve the problem of the wide variety in handwritten Chinese characters. Despite their complexity, Chinese characters can be seen as structured patterns. Therefore, we propose a symbolic representation to describe these structural formations. In particular, we consider the Fuzzy Attributed Production Rule (FAPR) as a possible symbolic representation. On the neural computational side, we study Fukushima's Neocognitron model, which has been successfully demonstrated to recognize handwritten alphanumerics. Despite its power and tolerance capabilities, the supervised training scheme used by Fukushima is impractical for a large character set such as Chinese characters. We thus propose a ruleembedded Neocognitron network which can be readily mapped with structure-knowledge of Chinese characters as represented in FAPRs. In this paper, we demonstrate how 50 Chinese characters are mapped onto the network, and that the system performance in tolerating character structure deviations is satisfactory.