Deep Convolutional Self-Organizing Map Network for Robust Handwritten Digit Recognition

Abstract

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) are currently the predominant technique commonly used to learn visual features from images. However, the complex structure of most recent DCNNs impose two major requirements namely, huge labeled dataset and high computational resources. In this paper, we develop a new efficient deep unsupervised network to learn invariant image representation from unlabeled visual data. The proposed Deep Convolutional Self-organizing Maps (DCSOM) network comprises a cascade of convolutional SOM layers trained sequentially to represent multiple levels of features. The 2D SOM grid is commonly used for either data visualization or feature extraction. However, this work employs high dimensional map size to create a new deep network. The N-Dimensional SOM (ND-SOM) grid is trained to extract abstract visual features using its classical competitive learning algorithm. The topological order of the features learned from ND-SOM helps to absorb local transformation and deformation variations exhibited in the visual data. The input image is divided into an overlapped local patches where each local patch is represented by the N-coordinates of the winner neuron in the ND-SOM grid. Each dimension of the ND-SOM can be considered as a non-linear principal component and hence it can be exploited to represent the input image using N-Feature Index Image (FII) bank. Multiple convolutional SOM layers can be cascaded to create a deep network structure. The output layer of the DCSOM network computes local histograms of each FII bank in the final convolutional SOM layer. A set of experiments using MNIST handwritten digit database and all its variants are conducted to evaluate the robust representation of the proposed DCSOM network. Experimental results reveal that the performance of DCSOM outperforms state-of-the-art methods for noisy digits and achieve a comparable performance with other complex deep learning architecture for other image variations.

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An Efficient Method for Handwritten Kannada Digit Recognition based on PCA and SVM Classifier

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