A Comparison of Neural Classifiers for Graffiti Recognition

Technological advances and the enormous flood of papers have motivated many researchers and companies to innovate new technologies. In particular, handwriting recognition is a very useful technology to support applications like electronic books (eBooks), post code readers (that sort mails in post offices), and some bank applications. This paper proposes three systems to discriminate handwritten graffiti digits (0 to 9) and some commands with different architectures and abilities. It introduces three classifiers, namely single neural network (SNN) classifier, parallel neural networks (PNN) classifier and tree-structured neural network (TSNN) classifier. The three classifiers have been designed through adopting feed forward neural networks. In order to optimize the network parameters (connection weights), the back-propagation algorithm has been used. Several architectures are applied and examined to present a comparative study about these three systems from different perspectives. The research focuses on examining their accuracy, flexibility and scalability. The paper presents an analytical study about the impacts of three factors on the accuracy of the systems and behavior of the neural networks in terms of the number of the hidden neurons, the model of the activation functions and the learning rate. Therefore, future directions have been considered significantly in this paper through designing particularly flexible systems that allow adding many more classes in the future without retraining the current neural networks.