A serial combination of connectionist-based classifiers for OCR

In this paper we describe the connectionist-based classification engine of an OCR system. The classification engine is based on a new modular connectionist architecture, where a multilayer perceptron (MLP) acting as a classifier is properly combined with a set of autoassociators – one for each class – trained to copy the input to the output layer. The MLP-based classifier selects a small group of classes with high score, that are afterwards verified by the corresponding autoassociators. The learning samples used to train the classifiers are constructed by means of a synthetic noise generator starting from few grey level characters labeled by the user. We report experimental results for comparing three neural architectures: an MLP-based classifier, an autoassociator-based classifier, and the proposed combined architecture. The experiments show that the proposed architecture exhibits the best performance, without increasing significantly the computational burden. Received March 6, 2000 / Revised July 12, 2000