Neural Network Toolbox

Appcr1: Character Recognition

It is often useful to have a machine perform pattern recognition. In particular, machines that can read symbols are very cost effective. A machine that reads banking checks can process many more checks than a human being in the same time. This kind of application saves time and money, and eliminates the requirement that a human perform such a repetitive task. The script appcr1 demonstrates how character recognition can be done with a backpropagation network.

Problem Statement

A network is to be designed and trained to recognize the 26 letters of the alphabet. An imaging system that digitizes each letter centered in the system's field of vision is available. The result is that each letter is represented as a 5-by-7 grid of Boolean values.

For example, here is the letter A.

However, the imaging system is not perfect and the letters may suffer from noise.

Perfect classification of ideal input vectors is required, and reasonably accurate classification of noisy vectors.

The twenty-six 35-element input vectors are defined in the function prprob as a matrix of input vectors called alphabet. The target vectors are also defined in this file with a variable called targets. Each target vector is a 26-element vector with a 1 in the position of the letter it represents, and 0's everywhere else. For example, the letter A is to be represented by a 1 in the first element (as A is the first letter of the alphabet), and 0's in elements two through twenty-six.

Network Generalization

Neural Network

© 1994-2005 The MathWorks, Inc.