Using a neural net to instantiate a deformable model

Deformable models are an attractive approach to recognizing non(cid:173) rigid objects which have considerable within class variability. How(cid:173) ever, there are severe search problems associated with fitting the models to data. We show that by using neural networks to provide better starting points, the search time can be significantly reduced. The method is demonstrated on a character recognition task. In previous work we have developed an approach to handwritten character recogni(cid:173) tion based on the use of deformable models (Hinton, Williams and Revow, 1992a; Revow, Williams and Hinton, 1993).