Increased robustness against background noise: Pattern recognition by a neocognitron

Abstract

The neocognitron is a hierarchical multi-layered neural network capable of robust visual pattern recognition. It has been demonstrated that recent versions of the neocognitron exhibit excellent performance for recognizing handwritten digits. When characters are written on a noisy background, however, recognition rate was not always satisfactory. This paper proposes several modifications, by which the neocognitrons can be much more robust against background noise. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.