Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Handwriting has continued to persist as a means of communication and recording information in day-to-day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Given its ubiquity in human transactions, machine recognition of handwriting has practical significance, as in reading handwritten notes in a PDA, in postal addresses on envelopes, in amounts in bank checks, in handwritten fields in forms, etc. This overview describes the nature of handwritten language, how it is transduced into electronic data, and the basic concepts behind written language recognition algorithms. Both the online case (which pertains to the availability of trajectory data during writing) and the off-line case (which pertains to scanned images) are considered. Algorithms for preprocessing, character and word recognition, and performance with practical systems are indicated. Other fields of application, like signature verification, writer authentification, handwriting learning tools are also considered.

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Online and off-line handwriting recognition: a comprehensive survey

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) constitute a class of flexible nonlinear models designed to mimic biological neural systems. In this entry, we introduce ANN using familiar econometric terminology and provide an overview of ANN modeling approach and its implementation methods. † Correspondence: Chung-Ming Kuan, Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Sec. 2, Taipei 115, Taiwan; ckuan@econ.sinica.edu.tw. †† I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the editor, Professor Steven Durlauf, for his patience and constructive comments on early drafts of this entry. I also thank Shih-Hsun Hsu and Yu-Lieh Huang for very helpful suggestions. The remaining errors are all mine.

Artificial neural networks

This chapter introduces the subject of statistical pattern recognition (SPR). It starts by considering how features are defined and emphasizes that the nearest neighbor algorithm achieves error rates comparable with those of an ideal Bayes’ classifier. The concepts of an optimal number of features, representativeness of the training data, and the need to avoid overfitting to the training data are stressed. The chapter shows that methods such as the support vector machine and artificial neural networks are subject to these same training limitations, although each has its advantages. For neural networks, the multilayer perceptron architecture and back-propagation algorithm are described. The chapter distinguishes between supervised and unsupervised learning, demonstrating the advantages of the latter and showing how methods such as clustering and principal components analysis fit into the SPR framework. The chapter also defines the receiver operating characteristic, which allows an optimum balance between false positives and false negatives to be achieved.

Statistical Pattern Recognition

Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems Evolutionary Computation Introduction to Genetic Fuzzy Systems Genetic Tuning Processes Learning with Genetic Algorithms Genetic Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems Based on the Michigan Approach Genetic Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems Based on the Pittsburgh Approach Genetic Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems Based on the lterative Rule Learning Approach Other Genetic Fuzzy Rule-Based System Other Kinds of Evolutionary Fuzzy Systems Applications.

Genetic Fuzzy Systems: Evolutionary Tuning And Learning Of Fuzzy Knowledge Bases

In this paper, we present a new sliding window based local thresholding technique 'NICK' and give a detailed
comparison of some existing sliding-window based thresholding algorithms with our method. The proposed method aims
at achieving better binarization results, specifically, for ancient document images. NICK has been inspired from the
Niblack's binarization method and exhibits its robustness and effectiveness when evaluated on low quality ancient
document images.

Comparison of Niblack inspired binarization methods for ancient documents

Text independent writer recognition using redundant writing patterns with contour-based orientation and curvature features

We present in this paper a review of methods for segmentation of uncompressed video sequences. Video segmentation is usually performed in the temporal domain by shot change detection. In case of real-time segmentation, computational complexity is one of the criteria which has to be taken into account when comparing different methods. When dealing with uncompressed video sequences, this criterion is even more significant. However, previous published reviews did not involve complexity criterion when comparing shot change detection methods. Only recognition rate and ability to classify detected shot changes were considered. So contrary to previous reviews, we give here the complexity of most of the described methods. We review in this paper an extensive set of methods presented in the literature and classify them in several parts, depending on the information used to detect shot changes. The earliest methods were comparing successive frames by relying on the most simple elements, that is to say pixels. Comparison could be performed on a global level, so methods based on histograms were also proposed. Block-based methods have been considered to process data at an intermediate level, between local (using pixels) and global (using histograms) levels. More complex features can be involved, resulting in feature-based methods. Alternatively some methods rely on motion as a criterion to detect shot changes. Finally, different kinds of information could be combined together in order to increase the quality of shot change detection. So our review will detail segmentation methods based on the following information: pixel, histogram, block, feature, motion, or other kind of information.

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A review of real-time segmentation of uncompressed video sequences for content-based search and retrieval

This communication presents an effective method for writer recognition in handwritten documents. We have introduced a set of features that are extracted from the contours of handwritten images at different observation levels. At the global level, we extract the histograms of the chain code, the first and second order differential chain codes and, the histogram of the curvature indices at each point of the contour of handwriting. At the local level, the handwritten text is divided into a large number of small adaptive windows and within each window the contribution of each of the eight directions (and their differentials) is counted in the corresponding histograms. Two writings are then compared by computing the distances between their respective histograms. The system trained and tested on two different data sets of 650 and 225 writers respectively, exhibited promising results on writer identification and verification.

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A Set of Chain Code Based Features for Writer Recognition

We are concerned with the extraction of tables from exchange format representations of very diverse composite documents. We put forward a flexible representation scheme for complex tables, based on a clear distinction between the physical layout of a table and its logical structure. Relying on this scheme, we develop a new method for the detection and the extraction of tables by an analysis of the graphic lines. To deal with tables that lack all or most of the graphic marks, one must focus on the regularities of the text elements alone. We propose such a method, based on a multi-level analysis of the layout of text components on a page. A general graph representation of the relative positions of blocks of text is exploited.

Nicole Vincent

Papers

Comparison of Niblack inspired binarization methods for ancient documents

Text independent writer recognition using redundant writing patterns with contour-based orientation and curvature features

A review of real-time segmentation of uncompressed video sequences for content-based search and retrieval

A Set of Chain Code Based Features for Writer Recognition

Detection, extraction and representation of tables