Learning to See Where and What: Training a Net to Make Saccades and Recognize Handwritten Characters

This paper describes an approach to integrated segmentation and recognition of hand-printed characters. The approach, called Saccade, integrates ballistic and corrective saccades (eye movements) with character recognition. A single backpropagation net is trained to make a classification decision on a character centered in its input window, as well as to estimate the distance of the current and next character from the center of the input window. The net learns to accurately estimate these distances regardless of variations in character width, spacing between characters, writing style and other factors.