Transformation Invariant Autoassociation with Application to Handwritten Character Recognition

When training neural networks by the classical backpropagation algorithm thewhole problem to learn must be expressed by a set of inputs and desired outputs. However, we often have high-level knowledge about the learning problem. In optical character recognition (OCR), for instance, weknow that the classification should be invariant under a set of transformations like rotation or translation. We propose a new modular classification system based on several autoassociative multilayer perceptrons whichallows the efficient incorporation of such knowledge. Results are reported on the NIST database of upper case handwritten letters and compared to other approaches to the invariance problem. 1 INCORPORATION OF EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE The aim of supervised learning is to learn a mapping between the input and the output space from a set of example pairs (input, desired output). The classical implementation in the domain of neural networks is the backpropagation algorithm. If this learning set is sufficiently representative of the underlying data distributions, one hopes that after learning, the system is able to generalize correctly to other inputs of the same distribution.