A new hybrid approach in combining multiple experts to recognise handwritten numerals

Hand written numeral recognition is an area of pattern recognition that has applications in numerous fields including automated postal sorting, automatic bank cheque processing, hand written document analysis and so on. Recently, the potential advantages of using multiple experts in a unified structure have been demonstrated in addressing the problem of classification of hand written numerals. The motivation behind this paper is to implement a new approach to the solution of the problem of combining the decisions made by multiple experts, by making use of the restrictive and repetitive nature of the numeral structures and combining the a priori knowledge of the expected numeral classes that are to be processed and recognised with that derived from the training samples. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.