Handwritten numeral recognition with a quantum neural network model

Handwritten numeral recognition has generated significant interest in last several years owing to its sundry application potentials in the fields of image processing and computer vision. Recently, quantum neural networks (QNN) have been found to be efficient for information processing, such as image classification, recognition and optimization, owing to its distinct features. Therefore, in this study, a QNN based handwritten character recognition system is studied. Experiments are conducted with the data from the MNIST database. Back-propagation (BP) algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm are used during the training process to improve the performance of the QNN. The resulting recognition rate of this proposed system is up to 99.16%. The results of the experiments clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed QNN in terms of its convergence speed and recognition rate as compared to other classical recognition methods, and simultaneously show the superiority of the QNN in solving character recognition problems.