Robust handwritten word recognition with fuzzy sets

A hybrid fuzzy neural system is used to improve a handwritten word recognition algorithm. The word recognition algorithm matches digital images of handwritten words to strings in a lexicon. This algorithm requires a module to assign character class membership values to images of segments of handwritten words. Many of these images are not characters. It is shown that a hybrid neural system consisting of a cascade of a Kohonen Self Organizing Feature Map (SOFM) followed by Choquet fuzzy integrals can yield improved performance over a multi-layer feedforward network (MLFN). The hybrid method scored a word recognition rate of 85% compared to 77% for the MLFN method.