Character recognition with selective attention

Selective attention is one of the most essential mechanisms for visual pattern recognition. One of the authors had previously proposed a model of selective attention, which has a function of segmenting patterns, as well as the function of recognizing patterns. The idea of this selective attention model can be extended to be used for several applications. The structure of the model used for connected character recognition is discussed. The authors offer two examples of its applications. One is the recognition and segmentation of connected characters in cursive handwriting of English words. Another example is the recognition of Chinese characters. Preliminary experiments with computer simulation, in which only a small number of characters have been taught to the models, show that this approach is promising for both of the applications