Comments on: Utilizing ANNs More Efficiently

By: Debt Reduction Services

Debt Reduction Services — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:08:16 +0000

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By: Harry

Harry — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:40:39 +0000

Yeah, a specialist niche market. I doubt there’s a huge number interested which is why we need to steal the guys from gocr camp and make them work on our projects open source style. If it did cursive offline handwriting recognition that would raise a few more eyebrows from people with different motives. Even if it was writer dependent.

I’m currently just using ANNs for segmentation because I’m lazy. I like to staple ANNs together and leave them training in the background. I wonder if with enough of them stapled together testing for different parameters all trained on noisy input we could out perform some of the best ocr software with half the code. Don’t go overboard on the feature extraction just keep it to basic observations of different things and then link it with another ANN testing on another observation, and then just plug all the outputs into one final network. Steal someone’s layout analysis code from somewhere. Strip out their copyright notices and put it all together. Hire a used car salesman and sell it to people walking by who were only looking to buy stamps or something.

By: no-one

no-one — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:46:05 +0000

I see your point. Perhaps I should work on a package for building your own OCR using your choice of feature extraction, choice of classifier, include some example training and test sets, etc. Think there’s a market?

By: Harry

Harry — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:31:07 +0000

I guess I use neural networks because they’re simple and easy to understand as well as being pretty powerful. You can knock some code out pretty fast and it will do a lot. Several of those I haven’t even come across . I like hidden markov models too because they make a lot of probabilistic decisions on many different levels which is especially nice when you have something that conforms to certain boundaries which can be described by a markov process. But it takes a lot longer to code something that will use that technology.

What surprises me is that although there are open source solutions for these bits and pieces, no one has fitted all the parts together. We have a choice in open source OCR between gocr, ocrad, and tesseract. The user doesn’t get much choice in software configuration. The ocr program either works or fails.

By: no-one

no-one — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:02:48 +0000

What you’re describing is hierarchical classification. You might want to look into boosting as well.

I don’t see any reason you should use a neural net here over any other classifier. Look into some other classifiers, such as naive Bayesian classifies and Support Vector Machines, or even Bayesian networks. You’ll find that fast, free, open source solutions exist for all of them.

If you want to get more complicated start looking at adaptive mixture models and expectation maximization.

By: Harry

Harry — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:22:16 +0000

I’m just not sure of the best way to interlink them that’s all. Do you add it as an extra bunch of inputs with the pixel information or link two nets together… I haven’t tried the latter method but I reckon it might give the best results. Obviously you need to train 100,000 odd times but that’s just neural nets for ya.

By: Laboratory Testing

Laboratory Testing — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:28:54 +0000

Thats actually a very cool idea, I want to write a test program to see if that actually works.