Automatic design of cellular neural networks by means of genetic algorithms: finding a feature detector

The paper aims to examine the use of genetic algorithms to optimize subsystems of cellular neural network architectures. The application at hand is character recognition: the aim is to evolve an optimal feature detector in order to aid a conventional classifier network to generalize across different fonts. To this end, a performance function and a genetic encoding for a feature detector are presented. An experiment is described where an optimal feature detector is indeed found by the genetic algorithm.<>