Where to start Handwritten Recognition using Neural Network?

Question

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 1

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.