Combining symbolic with numeric attributes in multi-class object recognition problems

We present in this paper a shape representation that combines both structural and numerical information about each object. Each of these sources of information has its own advantages but in general they are not compatible with each other. In our work we show how it is often possible and beneficial to combine these two types of representation especially for complex objects that have some natural structure. The method is successfully applied to the problem of totally unconstrained handwritten character recognition. Combined with a simple classification scheme this representation yields a good performance both in speed and accuracy