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 usin

Answer 1

Introduction To Neural Networks for Java is a good introductory book and includes a handwriting recognition example.

Answer 2

If you are looking for concepts, I suggest BrainNet,

Neural Networks - Part I: A simple handwriting recognition system in .NET

http://amazedsaint.blogspot.com/2008/01/neural-networks-part-i-simple.html

BrainNet will help you to

• Obtain a fair understanding regarding Neurons and neural networks
• Gain a good concept regarding intelligent systems
• Learn how to play with this neural network library to use it in your projects.
• Understand how to develop some cool neural network programs

Answer 3

Peter Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is a good book on general AI and explains a lot about the basics, and there is a section on Back Propagation neural networks.

To train your neural network you'll need datasets.

There's THE MNIST DATABASE of handwritten digits, or the Pen-Based Recognition of Handwritten Digits Data Set at the UCI Machine Learning Repository

The UCI ML repository has lots of great datasets, many of which would be good to train neural networks. Even if you don't know what they're about you can grab some and see if your ML system can do the classification tasks. Look at Classification tasks with a large number of attributes and instances, although you can try smaller ones too when you start out.

By the way, there are a lot more techniques besides neural networks, including Support Vector Machines, which are popular.

Answer 4

I suggest you to start from handwritten digits recognition for the following reasons:

• The task is well-defined
• There's a very good database of handwritten digits mentioned above (MNIST)
• There're lots of implemented algorithms tested on this problem
• One of the most successful approach for this problem is convolutional neural networks which even were used in commercial applications. There're few implementations available including C++, CUDA, Matlab, Python. Unfortunately I don't know any Java implementations.

Answer 5

Have a look at some of the project floating around the net:

• Neural Network Handwriting Recognition Applet
• Handwriting Recognition in Java Technology
• Handwriting recognition

To list just the three first links Google spits out for "java handwriting recognition"

Some hints to get you started:

• If you can, work with vectors instead of bitmap graphics. Ideally, you should have the speed and direction of each stroke. It's often more simple to recognize a letter by the way in which a curve bends plus the speed at which it was drawn instead of the form.

• Attack the problem with several approaches. Use neural networks, shape recognition, size, previous and next letter, dictionaries. All of them will give you different results with different error levels. This can help greatly to improve the results.

Good luck!

Answer 6

the books: Character Recognition Systems: A Guide for Students and Practitioners and Recognition of Whiteboard Notes: Online, Offline and Combination are good points of starts.