A SOM combined with KNN for classification task

Classification is a common task that humans perform when making a decision. Techniques of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) or statistics are used to help in an automatic classification. This work addresses a method based in Self-Organizing Maps ANN (SOM) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) statistical classifier, called SOM-KNN, applied to digits recognition in car plates. While being much faster than more traditional methods, the proposed SOM-KNN keeps competitive classification rates with respect to them. The experiments here presented contrast SOM-KNN with individual classifiers, SOM and KNN, and the results are classification rates of 89.48±5.6, 84.23±5.9 and 91.03±5.1 percent, respectively. The equivalency between SOM-KNN and KNN recognition results are confirmed with ANOVA test, which shows a p-value of 0.27.