COMENIUS UNIVERSITY IN BRATISLAVA

FACULTY OF MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS AND INFORMATICS

HANDWRITTEN CHARACTER RECOGNITION USING

MACHINE LEARNING METHODS
Bachelor's Thesis

Study Program:

Applied Informatics

Branch of Study:

2511 Applied Informatics

Educational Institution:

Department of Applied Informatics

Supervisor:

Mgr. udovt Malinovsk

Bratislava, 2013
Ivor Uhliarik

Acknowledgment
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Mgr. udovt Malinovsk for
invaluable consultations, interest, initiative, and continuous support throughout the
duration of writing this thesis. I would also like to thank my family, fellow colleagues and
all the people that have supported me. Finally, I would like to thank Martin Boze and the
rest of the n'c community for listening to my rants and all the witty remarks.

Declaration on Word of Honor

I declare that this thesis has been written by myself using only the listed references and
consultations provided by my supervisor.

Bratislava, ................ 2013

..................................
Ivor Uhliarik

Abstract
The aim of this work is to review existing methods for the handwritten character
recognition problem using machine learning algorithms and implement one of them for a
user-friendly Android application. The main tasks the application provides a solution for
are handwriting recognition based on touch input, handwriting recognition from live
camera frames or a picture file, learning new characters, and learning interactively based
on user's feedback. The recognition model we have chosen is a multilayer perceptron, a
feedforward artificial neural network, especially because of its high performance on nonlinearly separable problems. It has also proved powerful in OCR and ICR systems [1] that
could be seen as a further extension of this work. We had evaluated the perceptron's
performance and configured its parameters in the GNU Octave programming language,
after which we implemented the Android application using the same perceptron
architecture, learning parameters and optimization algorithms. The application was then
tested on a training set consisting of digits with the ability to learn alphabetical or different
characters.

Keywords: Character recognition, Multilayer Perceptron, Backpropagation, Rprop, Image

processing

Abstrakt
Cieom tejto prce je ponknu prehad metd rozpoznvania rukou psanch znakov
pomocou algoritmov strojovho uenia a jeden z nich implementova vo forme Android
aplikcie priateskej pre pouvateov. Hlavnmi poiadavkami na tto aplikciu s
rozpoznvanie rukou psanho psma pomocou dotykovch senzorov Android zariadenia a
zo zberov kamery alebo sboru s obrzkom, uenie novch, dosia nepoznanch znakov a
interaktvne uenie poda sptnej vzby pouvatea. Ako model uenia sme zvolili
dopredn neurnov sie viacvrstvov perceptrn. Vobu ovplyvnil vysok vkon na
nelinerne separovatench problmoch, ako aj fakt, e sa asto pouva v OCR a ICR
systmoch [1], ktor by sa dali prirovna rozreniam tejto prce. Pre testovanie a
vyhodnotenie vkonu, ako aj sprvne nastavenie parametrov perceptrnu sme pouili
programovac jazyk GNU Octave. Na zklade dosiahnutej konfigurcie sme ho
implementovali vo vytvorenej Android aplikcii, priom sme pouili rovnak architektru,
parametre a algoritmy optimalizcie. Aplikciu sme testovali na trnovacej sade cifier s
monosou pridania a nauenia alfabetickch a inch znakov.

Kov slov: Rozpoznvanie znakov, Viacvrstvov perceptrn, Backpropagation,

Rprop, Spracovanie obrazu

Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................................................1
1. Overview............................................................................................................................3
1.1 Project Description......................................................................................................3
1.2 Character Recognition Algorithms..............................................................................4
1.2.1 Image Preprocessing............................................................................................4
1.2.2 Feature Extraction................................................................................................7
1.2.3 Classification........................................................................................................9
1.2.3.1 Logistic Regression....................................................................................10
1.2.3.2 Multilayer Perceptron.................................................................................12
1.3 Existing Applications................................................................................................12
1.3.1 Full-featured Document OCR and ICR Systems...............................................12
1.3.2 Input methods.....................................................................................................13
2. Learning Model in Detail.................................................................................................14
2.1 Representation...........................................................................................................14
2.2 Hypothesis.................................................................................................................16
2.3 Learning: Backpropagation.......................................................................................17
2.4 Learning: Resilient Backpropagation........................................................................20
2.5 Bias, Variance............................................................................................................22
3. Solution Description.........................................................................................................24
3.1 Functional Specification............................................................................................24
3.2 Plan of Solution.........................................................................................................25
3.2.1 Recognition Process Pipelines...........................................................................25
3.2.2 Network Architecture.........................................................................................27
3.2.3 Offline and Online Learning..............................................................................28
3.2.4 Used Technologies.............................................................................................29
4. Implementation.................................................................................................................30
4.1 Android Application Implementation........................................................................30
4.2 Android Application Source Code............................................................................34
5. Results..............................................................................................................................36
5.1 Collection Methods....................................................................................................36
5.1 Result Comparison....................................................................................................37
6. Conclusion........................................................................................................................39
Bibliography.........................................................................................................................40
Appendices...........................................................................................................................42
Appendix A: DVD...........................................................................................................42
Appendix B: Android Application Screenshots..............................................................43

List of Abbreviations and Symbols

OCR

Optical Character Recognition.

ICR

Intelligent Character Recognition.

Matrix of all training examples. Each row contains a feature vector of a single
example.

Feature vector of a training example

A vector of labels of training examples.

Number of layers in a network.

Number of training examples.

Weights of a neural network. Superscript denotes a layer, subscripts denote

index of an element.

a(l)

Vector of neuron activations in layer l.

Hypothesis of a classifier with given weights .

sj

The size of layer j.

g(z)

Sigmoid function of z.

J()

Cost function of weights .

(l)

Vector of error terms for neurons in layer l.

(l)

Accumulator of error terms for neurons in layer l in the context of pure

backpropagation algorithm.

(t)

Matrix of weight update sizes for iteration t in the context of RPROP.

(t)

Matrix of weight change values in the context of RPROP.

Initial weight step size in RPROP.

Acceleration of weight step size in RPROP.

Deceleration of weight step size in RPROP.

Network regularization parameter.

Introduction
Handwritten character recognition is a field of research in artificial intelligence, computer
vision, and pattern recognition. A computer performing handwriting recognition is said to
be able to acquire and detect characters in paper documents, pictures, touch-screen devices
and other sources and convert them into machine-encoded form. Its application is found in
optical character recognition and more advanced intelligent character recognition
systems. Most of these systems nowadays implement machine learning mechanisms such
as neural networks.
Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence inspired by psychology and biology
that deals with learning from a set of data and can be applied to solve wide spectrum of
problems. A supervised machine learning model is given instances of data specific to a
problem domain and an answer that solves the problem for each instance. When learning is
complete, the model is able not only to provide answers to the data it has learned on, but
also to yet unseen data with high precision.
Neural networks are learning models used in machine learning. Their aim is to simulate the
learning process that occurs in an animal or human neural system. Being one of the most
powerful learning models, they are useful in automation of tasks where the decision of a
human being takes too long, or is imprecise. A neural network can be very fast at
delivering results and may detect connections between seen instances of data that human
cannot see.
We have decided to implement a neural network in an Android application that recognizes
characters written on the device's touch screen by hand and extracted from camera and
images provided by the device. Having acquired the knowledge that is explained in this
text, the neural network has been implemented on a low level without using libraries that
already facilitate the process. By doing this, we evaluate the performance of neural
networks in the given problem and provide source code for the network that can be used to
solve many different classification problems. The resulting system is a subset of a complex
OCR or ICR system; these are seen as possible future extensions of this work.
In the first chapter, we describe the overall project in greater detail and review existing
1

approaches, algorithms and systems of similar nature. For overview, we also briefly
explain the specific algorithms that have been used in the implementation of the project.
In the second chapter, we explain the chosen neural network model and algorithms on a
low level. The information contained in this chapter should be sufficient in order to begin
implementing the learning model.
Chapter 3 discusses the design choices made before implementing the Android application.
The requirements of the application are specified and the plan of the solution is laid out.
The fourth chapter, implementation, gives a description of how the requirements have been
satisfied, what problems have arisen and how they were solved, and also serve as a
technical guide for the application users. The structure of the source code is also depicted.
Chapter 5 compares and discusses the numerical results of the network learning
algorithms.
Finally, in the conclusion, we talk about the accomplishments of this work and state how
the application can be used in other projects or extended to a more complex system.

1. Overview
In order to reach the analysis of the used learning model and the specification and
implementation of the algorithms, and consequently, the Android application, we had to
review existing approaches to the problem of character recognition. In this chapter, we
describe the project and compare the methods that have been considered as candidates for
this work.

1.1 Project Description

It has already been stated that the primary goal of our projectan Android applicationis
able to recognize handwritten characters based on user's touch input and image/camera
input in an offline manner. Also, the application provides means of adding and learning a
new character and learning interactively from user's feedback.
Android has been selected as the most feasible platform, because many Android devices
feature capacitive touch screens, which are very friendly to finger touch input, and
cameras, which are necessary to satisfy the camera recognition requirement. Although
developing a high quality Android application according to Android development
guidelines has not been our primary focus, these have nonetheless not been ignored.
Feature-wise, the application distinguishes two cases: learning from touch input, taking
into account both the character bitmap and the individual strokes the user writes, as
opposed to learning from a picture bitmap, where we only recognize the character bitmap.
Formally, both cases fall into the offline approach to handwriting recognition [2]. In this
approach, the complete character image is the only information available. Online
recognition, on the other hand, describes storing the two-dimensional coordinates of points
of the writing as a function of time, hence individual strokes are ordered. Therefore, when
recognizing user touch input, the use of stroke analysis might resemble the online approach
as well because of the additional data provided, even though the strokes are not ordered in
time. As such, the system is able to precisely separate certain characters of high bitmap
similarity, as in the case of the '8' and the 'B' characters, while being invariant to the order
of the strokes the user writes.

We understand interactive learning with user feedback as using online machine learning.
This should not be confused with online and offline handwriting recognition, which is
described above. Online learning is defined as learning one instance of data at a time,
expecting feedbackthe real label of a character input by a userto be provided after the
neural network's prediction. On the other hand, offline learning performs all of the learning
process prior to making any predictions and does not change its prediction hypothesis
afterward. The two methods are examples of lazy and eager learning, respectively.
Online machine learning makes the system more adaptive to change, such as a change in
trends, prices, market needs, etc. In our case, user feedback makes the system able to adapt
to a change in handwriting style, perhaps caused by a change of user. We use both offline
and online learning in this work. Initially, the user expects from the application to just
work, so offline learning on initial data is performed. When the system mislabels a
character or the user wants to add a new one, they make a correction, refining the system
progressively. Moreover, online learning executes after correct prediction as well, so the
system should be able to perform better the more it is used.
In addition to implementing the Android application, we have tested and evaluated the
used algorithms in the GNU Octave programming language. The language and its features
are dominant in prototyping and make it very easy to visualize data. It is also well suited
for machine learning applications as matrix manipulations are part of the language's
grammar.

1.2 Character Recognition Algorithms

The algorithms used in character recognition may be divided into three categories: image
preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification. They are normally used in sequence
image preprocessing helps make feature extraction a smoother process, while feature
extraction is necessary for correct classification.

1.2.1 Image Preprocessing

Image preprocessing is crucial in the recognition pipeline for correct character prediction.
These methods typically include noise removal, image segmentation, cropping, scaling,
and more. In our project, these methods have mainly been used when recognizing from an

image, but some of them, such as cropping the written character and scaling it to our input
size, are also performed in the touch mode.
Digital capture and conversion of an image often introduces noise which makes it hard to
decide what is actually a part of the object of interest and what is not. Considering the
problem of character recognition, we want to reduce as much noise as possible, while
preserving the strokes of the characters, since they are important for correct classification.
There are many ways of achieving this. Local processing is one of them.
According to [10], local preprocessing makes use of a small area around the pixel of
question in the input imagea maskto compute the output value of the pixel in the
output image. This is called filtering. For this task we use convolutional masks that scan an
image, ideally reducing all unwanted noise. Masks are square matrices with elements
representing weights of the surrounding area pixels that determine the light intensity value
of the pixel at hand.

[ ]

1 1 1 1
1 1 1
9
1 1 1
Typical average
value
h=

[ ]

1 1 1 1
1 2 1
10
1 1 1
Centroid
highlight

h=

(1.1)

(1.2)

In order to preserve character strokes in our project, we have used median filtering, which
is a non-linear operation. A median filter replaces the pixel's value with the median of the
intensity of surrounding pixels. The result is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Median filtering: (a) image corrupted with noise; (b)

3x3 median filtering applied to the image [10].

The task of image segmentation is to split an image into parts with strong correlation with
objects or the real world properties the image represents [10]. Probably the simplest image
segmentation method is thresholding. Thresholding is the extraction of the foreground,
which is a character in our case, from the rather monotonic background [3]. In a gray-scale
image, this is equal to binarization of its real-valued data. An image threshold is selected,
according to which the input image is converted. Given an input pixel f(i, j) and threshold
T, the output pixel g(i, j) is calculated as follows:

g (i , j)= 1
0

,if f (i , j )T
, if f (i , j)<T

Figure 2: Image thresholding: (a) original image; (b) thresholded

segmentation applied to the original image [10].

(1.3)

Finally, in both touch and image based recognition in our work, we have used cropping and
scaling of the images to a small fixed size.

1.2.2 Feature Extraction

Features of input data are the measurable properties of observations, which one uses to
analyze or classify these instances of data. The task of feature extraction is to choose
relevant features that discriminate the instances well and are independent of each other.
According to [3], selection of a feature extraction method is probably the single most
important factor in achieving high recognition performance. There is a vast amount of
methods for feature extraction from character images, each having different characteristics,
invariance properties, and reconstructability of characters. [3] states that in order to answer
to the question of which method is best suited for a given situation, an experimental
evaluation must be performed.
The methods explained in [3] are template matching, deformable templates, unitary image
transforms, graph description, projection histograms, contour profiles, zoning, geometric
moment invariants, Zernike moments, spline curve approximation, and Fourier descriptors.
To describe the way feature extraction is sometimes done in handwriting recognition, we
briefly explain one of them.
Projection histograms were introduced in 1956 in an OCR system by Glauberman [6] and
are used in segmentation of characters, words, and text lines, or to detect if a scanned text
page is rotated [3]. We collect the horizontal and vertical projections of an image by setting
each horizontal and vertical bin value to the count of pixels in respective rows and
columns (Figure 3), where neighboring bins can be merged to make the features scale
independent. The projection is, however, variant to rotation and variability in writing style.
The two histograms are then compared and a dissimilarity measure is obtained, which can
be used as a feature vector.

Figure 3: Horizontal and vertical

projection histograms [3].

As we have mentioned, there is no method that is intrinsically perfect for a given task.
Evaluation of such methods would take a lot of time and it is not in the scope of this work.
Instead, we set our focus on multilayer feedforward neural networks, which can be viewed
as a combination of a feature extractor and a classifier [3], the latter of which will be
explained shortly.
In our work, we have used the multilayer perceptron neural network model, which will be
more deeply described in the next chapter. For now, we can think of this model as a
directed graph consisting of at least 3 layers of nodes.
The first layer is called the input layer, the last layer is the output layer, and a number of
intermediate layers are known as hidden layers. Except of the input layer, nodes of neural
networks are also called neurons or units. Each node of a layer typically has a weighted
connection to the nodes of the next layer. The hidden layers are important for feature
extraction, as they create an internal abstraction of the data fed into the network. The more
hidden layers there are in a network, the more abstract the extracted features are.

Input layer

Hidden layer

Output layer

Figure 4: Basic view at the multilayer perceptron

architecture. It contains three layers, one of them being a
hidden layer. Layers consist of neurons; each layer is fully
connected to the next one.

1.2.3 Classification
Classification is defined as the task of assigning labels (categories, classes) to yet unseen
observations (instances of data). In machine learning, this is done on the basis of training
an algorithm on a set of training examples. Classification is a supervised learning problem,
where a teacher links a label to every instance of data. Label is a discrete number that
identifies the class a particular instance belongs to. It is usually represented as a nonnegative integer.
There are many machine learning models that implement classification; these are known as
classifiers. The aim of classifiers is to fit a decision boundary (Figure 4) in feature-space
that separates the training examples, so that the class of a new observation instance can be
correctly labeled. In general, the decision boundary is a hyper-surface that separates an Ndimensional space into two partitions, itself being N1-dimensional.

Figure 5: Visualization of a decision

boundary. In feature-space given by
x1 and x2, a decision boundary is
plotted
between
two
linearly
separable classes [9].

1.2.3.1 Logistic Regression

Logistic regression is a simple linear classifier. This algorithm tries to find the decision
boundary by iterating over the training examples, trying to fit parameters that describe the
decision boundary hyper-surface equation. During this learning process, the algorithm
computes a cost function (also called error function), which represents the error measure of
its hypothesis (the output value, prediction). This value is used for penalization, which
updates the parameters to better fit the decision boundary. The goal of this process is to
converge to parameter values that minimize the cost function. It has been proved [8] that
logistic regression is always convex, therefore the minimization process can always
converge to a minimum, thus finding the best fit of the decision boundary this algorithm
can provide.
Until now, we have been discussing binary classification. To apply logistic regression to
handwriting recognition, we would need more than 2 distinguishing classes, hence we need
multi-class classification. This can be solved by using the one-vs-all approach [9].

10

Figure 6: Multi-class classification of

three classes as it is split into three
sub-problems [9].
The principle of one-vs-all is to split the training set into a number of binary classification
problems. Considering we want to classify handwritten digits, the problem degrades into
10 sub-problems, where individual digits are separated from the rest. Figure 6 shows the
same for 3 classes of objects. The output of each sub-problem is a probability measure
representing how likely a data instance belongs to the class at hand. The overall class is
chosen as the class the sub-problem of which has the maximum probability.
To correctly classify data that are not linearly separable, one can use a logistic regression
algorithm while using a non-linear hypothesis to separate the classes. One then has to
include high-order polynomials in the feature vector to approximate the complex decision
boundary. This has an implicit problem of choosing the right polynomials, which can be an
enormous task; moreover, this problem is very specific to the task being solved. To avoid
this, all of the possible polynomials could be included, but in this way, the number of
features grows exponentially and it beings to be computationally challenging to train on
the data.

11

1.2.3.2 Multilayer Perceptron

Multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) are artificial neural networks, learning models inspired by
biology. As opposed to logistic regression, which is only a linear classifier on its own, the
multilayer perceptron learning model, which we already have mentioned in terms of
feature extraction, can also distinguish data that are not linearly separable.
We have already outlined the architecture of an MLP, as seen in (Figure 4).
In order to calculate the class prediction, one must perform feedforward propagation. Input
data are fed into the input layer and propagated further, passing through weighted
connections into hidden layers, using an activation function. Hence, the node's activation
(output value at the node) is a function of the weighted sum of the connected nodes at a
previous layer. This process continues until the output layer is reached.
The learning algorithm, backpropagation, is different from the one in logistic regression.
First, the cost function is measured on the output layer, propagating back to the
connections between the input and the first hidden layer afterwards, updating unit weights.
MLPs can perform multi-class classification as well, without any modifications. We simply
set the output layer size to the number of classes we want to recognize. After the
hypothesis is calculated, we pick the one with the maximum value.
A nonlinear activation function is required for the network to be able to separate nonlinearly separable data instances. This, along with the mentioned algorithms, will be
explained in next chapters.

1.3 Existing Applications

Handwritten character recognition is currently used extensively in OCR and ICR systems.
These are used for various purposes, some of which are listed below.

1.3.1 Full-featured Document OCR and ICR Systems

ABBYY FineReader by the ABBYY company is a piece of software with worldwide
recognition that deals with OCR and ICR systems, as well as applied linguistics [11]. The
company has also developed a business card reader mobile application that uses a

12

smartphone's camera for text recognition to import contact information [12]. The
application is, among others, also available for the Android platform.
Tesseract-ocr is an OCR engine developed at HP Labs between 1985 and 1995. It is
claimed [13] that this engine is the most accurate open source OCR engine available,
supporting a wide variety of image formats and over 60 languages. It is free and open
source software, licensed under Apache License 2.0.
Google Goggles is an image recognition Android and iOS application, featuring searching
based on pictures taken by compatible devices and using character recognition for some
use cases [14].

1.3.2 Input methods

Microsoft has been supporting a tablet handwriting-based input method since the release of
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition [15]. This allows users of devices with this platform to
write text using a digitizing tablet, a touch screen, or a mouse, which is converted into text
that can be used in most applications running on the platform.
Google Translate, a machine translation Android application from Google, features
handwriting recognition as an input method, as well as translating directly from the camera
[16]. This closely resembles a possible extension of our work in the future.

13

2. Learning Model in Detail

In this chapter, we explain in detail the model that has been used in the project to
successfully perform handwritten character recognition. Because this work primarily
discusses machine learning methods, the scope is limited to corresponding algorithms.
Specifically, as the multilayer perceptron has been chosen as a method for feature
extraction and classification, we deal with algorithms required for MLP implementation. In
case of insufficiency of the explanation of image preprocessing methods in the overview
chapter, refer to [10].
It has been mentioned in the previous chapter that the multilayer perceptron is a supervised
learning model that is able to classify multi-class, non-linearly separable data. As such, it is
considered one of the most powerful learning algorithms [9].

2.1 Representation
We have previously outlined the architecture of a multilayer perceptron. In short, it is a
directed graph with at least three layers, at least one of which is a hidden layer. The more
hidden layers there are, the most abstract features can be extracted from input data and the
more complex the decision boundary is. Neurons are the vertices of the graph, while
weighted connections are the edges.

Output values of neurons are referred to as

activations, and to compute the activation of a neuron in a layer, we use an activation

function on the weighted sum of the connected neuron values in the previous layer.
Input data are usually represented as a feature vector of real values, where the elements are
fed to individual input neurons. The representation of output data (hypothesis) depends on
the size of the output layer.

14

Figure 7: The architecture of a multilayer neural network. Layer 1 is

the input layer; layer 2 is a hidden layer; layer 3 is the output layer.
x1, x2, and x3 are features fed to the network; a1, a2, and a3 are
hidden layer units; h(x) is the output value (hypothesis). Each layer is
fully connected to the next one [9].

In binary classification, using a single output neuron is recommended [9]. Here, the
hypothesis is typically a real value. A threshold is then used to determine the
predicted class.

In multi-class problems, the size of the output layer is typically equal to the number
of classes. Thus, output data is represented as a vector of real values. The predicted
class is the element with the maximum value.

In general, however, we assume the output layer is always a real valued vector:

for output layer L,

[]

a(1L)
( L)
h ( x )=a (L)= a 2
...
a(sL)

(2.1)

To perform supervised learning, a set of labels (classes) has to be provided. We represent

these as a vector of the same size as the output vector:

[]

y1
y
y= 2
...
ys

15

(2.2)

The weights of a neuron are represented as real-valued matrices:

for layer l < L,

(l )

(l1, )1

(l1,2)

(l)
2,1

(l )
2,2

(l )
2, sl +1

l+ 1

l +1

l +1

...

(l1,s) +1
l

...
...
...
...
...
(l )
(l )
(l )
s , 1 s ,2 ... s ,s +1
l

(2.3)

Here, l is any layer except of the output layer. Using our notation, (l) is a matrix of
weights corresponding to the connection mapping from layer l to layer l + 1. sl is the
number of units in layer l, and sl + 1 is the number of units in layer l + 1. Thus, the size of
(l) is [sl + 1, sl + 1].
The additional neuron that is included in layer l is the bias neuron. Usually marked as x0 or
a (l0 ) , bias is a very important element in the network. It can alter the shift of the
activation function along the x-axis. The bias neuron is only connected to the next layerit
has no input connections.
Note that a row in the weights matrix represents connections from all of the neurons in
layer l to a single neuron in layer l + 1. Conversely, a column in the matrix represents
connections from a single neuron in layer l to all of the neurons in layer l + 1.

2.2 Hypothesis
Throughout this text, we've referred to hypothesis several times. It is the prediction of a
class, the output value of a classifier. As mentioned in chapter 1, in order to enable the
network to solve complex nonlinear problems, the use of a nonlinear activation function is
required.
In many cases, the sigmoid activation function is used:
1
g (z )=
,
(1+ ez )

(2.4)

The range of the sigmoid function is [0, 1], which is therefore also the range of the
elements in the output layer.
16

An activation of a neuron in a layer is computed as a sigmoid function of the linear

combination of the weights vector corresponding to the neuron and the activation of all
connected neurons from the previous layer. For convenience, we define the input layer
neuron vector as
x=a(1)

(2.5)

Using (2.4) and (2.5), we generalize the computation of a neuron's activation in a

vectorized form as
for layer l > 1,

(l )

(l 1)

a = g (

(l1)

(2.6)

Here, the sigmoid function is applied element-wise to the product of the weights and the
connected neurons from the previous layer, therefore a (l ) s .
l

It may be intuitive to go ahead and use (2.6) recursively to compute the overall hypothesis
of the network, but as we're assuming the bias neuron in the architecture, it needs to be
added to the vector of activations in layer l intermittently.
The process of determining the value of the hypothesis in the described way is called
forward propagation. The algorithm broken up into steps follows:
1. Start with the first hidden layer.
2. Compute the activations in the current layer using (2.6).
3. If the current layer is the output layer, we have reached the hypothesis and end.
4. Add a bias unit a (l0 )=1 to the vector of computed activations.
5. Advance to the next layer and go to step 2.

2.3 Learning: Backpropagation

A multilayer perceptron is a supervised learning model. As such, every example in the
training set is assigned a label, which is used to compute a cost function (an error
measure). As mentioned in the first chapter, learning is an optimization problem that
updates free parameters (weights) in order to minimize the cost function.

17

There is a number of different cost functions typically used when training multilayer
perceptrons. Training is often performed by minimizing the mean squared error, which is a
sum of squared differences between computed hypotheses and actual labels. However,
mean non-squared error is also used. To be consistent with [9], we have used a
generalization of the cost function used in logistic regression:

J ()=

1
[ y (ik ) log(( h (h(i )))k )(1 y (ik ))log(1( h ( x(i) ))k )]
m i=1 k=1

(2.7)

In (2.7), m is the number of training examples and K is the total number of possible labels.
(i )
h (x ) is computed using forward propagation described above.

The cost function above is not always convexthere may be more local minima. However,
according to [9], it is sufficient to reach a local minimum that is not global. In order to
reach a local minimum of the cost function, we use an optimization algorithm, such as
gradient descent. Gradient descent is a simple optimization algorithm that converges to a
local minimum by taking steps in a weight-space iteratively in so-called epochs. The size
of each step is proportional to the negative of the gradient of the cost function at the
current point.
There is an important factor that modifies the descent step size in machine learningthe
learning rate. It is a modifier that is used to tune how fast and how accurate the
optimization is and heavily determines the efficiency of a learning algorithm.

J()

J()

J()

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 8: The effect of learning rate on gradient descent. In (a), the learning
rate is optimal and gradient descent efficiently converges to a minimum. In (b),
the learning rate is too small; the algorithm still converges to a minimum, but
takes too many steps. In (c), the learning rate is too large and the algorithm
diverges.
18

Since gradient is the partial derivative of the cost function with respect to individual
parameters, the change of parameters in a single gradient descent step is performed as:
J ()
=

(2.8)

In Figure 8 we can see the effect of a wrong choice of the learning rate. There are advanced
ways on determining the right learning rate value, but it is usually sufficient to determine it
empirically after applying various learning rates to the learning algorithm and picking one
with the minimum error.
Obtaining the gradient in a multilayer perceptron is not trivial and is done in several steps.
As each neuron has its own activation and weighted connections, it takes its own part in
the cost function. To propagate the error measured on the output layer after a prediction,
each neuron's weights need to be updated differently. To achieve this, we introduce the
concept of an error term (lj ) , representing the error of node j in layer l.
To obtain the error terms for all neurons in the network except the input layer (as there is
no error in the input data), we do the following. Given an instance of input data x, forward
propagation is performed to determine the hypothesis. With the input label yj, starting at the
end of the network, we calculate the error terms for the output layer per neuron j:
( L)
(L)
j =a j y j

(2.9)

Note that the output activation a (L)

is a part of the hypothesis as shown in (2.1).
j
We then propagate the error to lower layers:
for layer 1 < l < L,

(l )

(l) T

(l +1)

j =( ) j

(l )

.g ' (z ),

(2.10)

where g' is the gradient of the sigmoid function and z(l) is a vector of the linear
combinations of all neurons and their respective weights in layer l - 1:
for layer 1 < l L,

(l)

(l 1 )

z =

(l1)

(2.11)

Using (2.11), it can be shown that the sigmoid gradient is

for layer 1 < l L,

g ' (z (l) )=a(l) .(1a(l )) ,

therefore (2.10) can be expressed using (2.12) as:

19

(2.12)

 (lj )=((l) )T (lj +1) .(a (l) .(1a(l )))

for layer 1 < l < L,

(2.13)

Collecting the error terms is essential for the computation of the partial derivatives of the
network. We will now describe the overall process of obtaining the partial derivatives,
called backpropagation, in the following pseudo-code. Note that in this pseudo-code,
matrix elements are indexed from 0, as opposed to mathematical notation, where indexing
starts at 1.

{( x(1) , y (1)) ,... ,( x (m) , y (m) ) }

01| We are given a training set

(l )
i , j :=0 for all l, i, j

02| Set

03| For i = 1 to m
(1)

a :=x

(i )

04|

Set

05|

Perform forward propagation to compute a(l) for l = 2, 3, , L

06|

Using y(i), compute

07|

Compute

08|

Set

09|

Di , j :=

(l)

(l )

(L1)
(l )

:= +

(L2)

(l+ 1)

( L)

(L)

=a y (i)
, ... ,

(2 )

(l ) T

(a )

1 (l )

m i, j

Now, the D term is equal to the following:

J ( )
(2.14)
(l)
Using these partial derivatives, we can perform gradient descent to minimize the cost
for layer l < L,

D(l) =

function and thus enable the algorithm to make predictions on new data.
It is important to note that before using backpropagation to learn the parameters, weights
should be initialized to random small numbers between 0 and 1. The weights must not be
initialized to zero, otherwise individual weight updates will be constant for all weights and
the minimization algorithm will fail to converge to a local minimum.

2.4 Learning: Resilient Backpropagation

Resilient backpropagation (RPROP) is an efficient optimization algorithm proposed by
Riedmiller and Braun in 1993 [4]. It is based on the principle of gradient descent used with
pure backpropagation. Instead of updating weights of a network with a fixed learning rate

20

that is constant for all weight connections, it performs a direct adaptation of the weight step
using only the sign of the partial derivative, not its magnitude. As such, it overcomes the
difficulty of setting the right learning rate value.
For each weight, an individual weight step size is introduced: i,j (not to be confused with
the symbol used when accumulating error in pure backpropagation). Given epoch t > 0 and
considering as a weight matrix for a single layer (this can be applied to any valid layer),
this value evolves during the learning process according to the following rule:

(ti , )j=

J () (t1) J ( ) (t )

>0

J ( ) (t 1 ) J () (t )
,if

<0
, else

+(ti ,1)
j

, if

(t1)
i, j

(t1)
i,j

(2.15)

where 0< <1< +

The change of the sign of the partial derivative across two epochs indicates the local
minimum of the cost function has been jumped over because of a large weight update step.
In this case, the step size is decreased by the factor

. On the other hand, if the sign of

the partial derivative has not been changed, the step size is increased by the factor

+ .

In effect, this method decelerates in gradient descent when the step would be too large to
converge, and accelerates in shallow regions where the step size is too small.
After determining the update values as shown in (2.15), the weights are updated, following
a rule:

(ti , )j

(ti ,)j =

+ (ti , )j
0

J () (t)
>0

J () (t)
, if
<0

,else
, if

(t +1)=(t )+ (ti , )j

(2.16)

(2.17)

In words, if the derivative is positive, which indicates an increasing error, the weight is
decreased; if the derivative is negative, the weight is increased.
An initial value of the weight update step 0 has to be set before using the algorithm. This
value is preferably chosen in proportion to the initial weight size. However, it has been
21

shown [4] that the choice of this value is not critical.

Empirically, the reasonable values for

, and 0 are 0.5, 1.2, and 0.1,

respectively [4].
In the original document [4] it was suggested that the previous update step be reverted if
the sign of the gradient changes (the minimum was missed). This is called backtracking.
However, in [5], an RPROP variation without backtracking has been proposed, simply
leaving this step out, as it is not crucial in the optimization process and is easier to
implement.

2.5 Bias, Variance

High bias and high variance, also called underfitting and overfitting, respectively, are
common causes of an unsatisfying learning algorithm performance.
If a learning model is presented with input with too many complex features, the learned
hypothesis may fit the training set very well (J() 0), but may fail to generalize the
prediction on new examples. In this case, overfitting may be observed. On the other hand,
if a classifier generalizes the hypothesis to an overly simple form, the error is usually high
on both the training set and new examples, which is caused by underfitting.

Figure 9: High bias, high variance. On the left, a learning algorithm underfits the
training examples and will likely fail at predictions on unseen examples; in the center,
the algorithm fits the examples just right; on the right, the algorithm overfits the
examples, fitting the training set, but will likely fail at predictions on unseen
examples.

22

To address overfitting, we may do one of the following:

1. Reduce the number of features

Manually select which features to keep

Use a dimensionality reduction algorithm, such as principal component

analysis (not covered in this work)

2. Get more examples (may help in some cases)

3. Apply regularization

Decreases the values of free parameters for better generalization

Used when all features contribute to a successful hypothesis

In regularization, a regularization parameter is used to penalize free parameters (weights

in an MLP). This is a real scalar value that takes part in the cost function and optimization
functions in order to affect the choice of free parameters and help with the high variance
problem. In the learning process, when > 0, the machine learning algorithm's parameters
are reduced, when < 0, the parameters are increased, and when = 0, no regularization
is performed. Being stated, we choose a high value for the regularization parameter to
avoid high variance and lower it in the case of high bias, because setting a too large
regularization parameter may be the cause of high bias itself.
To add regularization to the multilayer perceptron algorithms, we must modify (2.7):
m

1
J ()= [ y (ik ) log(( h (h(i )))k )(1 y (ik ))log(1( h ( x(i) )) k ) ]
m i=1 k=1
+
2m

[ ]
L1 sl+ 1

sl

(2.18)

(l ) 2
i, j

( )

l =1 i =1 j=2

In effect, this adds a condition to line 9 of the backpropagation pseudo-code:

09|

D(l)
i , j :=

1 (l )

m i, j

if j = 0

10|

D (l)
i , j :=

1 (l )
( + (li , )j)
m i,j

if j 0

As shown in (2.18) and in line 9, we do not add the regularization term for the bias units,
therefore we skip the first column of the weight matrix.
23

3. Solution Description
3.1 Functional Specification
As mentioned in the aim, there are four main requirements of the Android application that
has been developed:

ability to recognize characters written using the touch-sensitive display,

ability to recognize characters given an image or camera frames as input,

ability to learn progressively based on user's feedback

ability to learn new, previously unseen characters.

We will now describe these requirements in detail, listed below.

[R01]

The application provides means to enter a touch mode screen. Here, the user can
draw characters freely by hand.

[R01.1] When the user is done drawing, the drawing is recognized and the prediction is
shown to the user.
[R01.2] The drawing, along with the predicted label, can be saved to a persistent location.
[R01.3] The user can provide feedback on the prediction, signaling whether the prediction
was correct, or making a correction to the prediction, performing online learning.
[R02]

The application provides means to enter a camera mode screen. Here, the
device's camera is used to present its input to the screen.

[R02.1] After showing the camera frame, it is analyzed and found patterns are recognized
and shown to the user.
[R02.2] The process in [R02] and [R02.1] is done continuously as the camera frames are
updated over time.
[R02.3] The user can provide feedback on the prediction, signaling whether the prediction
was correct, or making a correction to the prediction, performing online learning.
[R03]

The application provides means to enter an image mode screen. Here, the user

24

can load an image file present on the device, which is then shown on the screen.
[R03.1] After showing the image, it is analyzed and found patters are recognized and
shown to the user.
[R04]

The user can see the list of all learned characters.

[R05]

The user can add a new character and train it using touch mode as described in
[R01].

[R06]

The user can perform offline learning on current persistent data at any time.

3.2 Plan of Solution

Here we are going to describe the choices that were needed to be made before starting to
implement the solution.

3.2.1 Recognition Process Pipelines

So far, we have named and described several algorithms dealing with image preprocessing,
learning, and optimization. These are thought of as building blocks when designing the
recognition process pipeline that would satisfy given requirements and they are often used
in sequence, one providing input for another. As briefly mentioned in the overview, we
have considered a process pipeline for recognition based on touch input, and a separate
pipeline for recognition based on static image input.
The recognition pipeline used to recognize characters in the touch input mode follows:
1. Acquire the handwritten character image as a gray-scale bitmap.
2. Resize this bitmap to 20x20 pixels.
3. Acquire a binary bitmap of points where each stroke has started and ended.
4. Resize this bitmap to 20x20 pixels.
5. Unroll the bitmap matrices to a feature vector of 800 elements.
6. Feed this vector to a trained multilayer perceptron, giving us the prediction.
The bitmaps have been chosen to be gray-scale and have a small resolution because it is
sufficient to perform correct prediction and the feature vector size is small enough to make
25

the learning and prediction computationally feasible. Similar bitmap sizes have been
chosen in related problems by Ng [9] and LeCun et al. [1].
As we have more data available in the touch mode than a pure image bitmap, we have also
decided to collect the bitmap of stroke end points to be able to better distinguish characters
such as '8' and 'B', as mentioned in the overview. The resized bitmaps of these characters
are often similar, but the writing style of each is usually different. By providing this extra
bitmap with each example, we are giving a hint to the neural network classifier about what
features to focus on when performing automatic feature extraction with the hidden layer.
The pipeline for recognition based on an image or a camera frame is different:
1. Acquire the image bitmap in gray-scale colors.
2. Apply a median filter to the bitmap.
3. Segment the bitmap using thresholding to get a binary bitmap.
4. Find the bounding boxes of external contours in the bitmap.
5. Extract sub-bitmaps from the bounding boxes.
6. Resize the sub-bitmaps to 20x20 pixels.
7. Unroll the sub-bitmap matrices to feature vectors per 400 elements.
8. Feed each feature vector to a trained multilayer perceptron, giving us predictions.
Our intention is to produce a similar input for the network as in the case of touch input,
only without the stroke end bitmaps as we do not possess this information in this mode.
With this approach, we are able to re-use bitmaps produced in touch input to train a
network that operates on images.
When preprocessing the image, we apply a median blur to remove noise. Median blur was
preferred to other blur filters because of its property of preserving edges, which are
important in character recognition.
Thresholding is a very simple segmentation algorithm that is sufficient to segment out
characters from the background and thus binarize the bitmap. This step is required, as the
background is an extra information we do not need in the recognition process.
Finding contours in the image and finding the bounding boxes of each pattern allows us to

26

detect more characters in an image at once. Given the bounding boxes, we are able to
extract bitmaps of the individual characters (or other patterns) and then perform the rest of
the processes just as in the touch mode pipeline, excluding, of course, the stroke end maps
in the feature vectors.

3.2.2 Network Architecture

We have used a multilayer perceptron as a feature extractor and a classifier. The model of
three layers, as used by Ng in [9], with the hidden layer size of 25, has been a likely
candidate. The choice of the right architecture determines the tendency of overfitting and
underfitting, while also affecting the computational performance of learning and
predictions. The results of implementation will be discussed in chapter 5.
As input, we will be considering only a set of digits (the network will distinguish 10
classes). However, the application will be ready to learn new characters, such as
alphabetical, or even punctuation marks.
It has already been mentioned that the feature vector size is 800 for touch mode and 400
for image and camera mode. Therefore, two different initial architecture instances are
maintained. In touch mode, the input, hidden, and output layer sizes are 800, 25, and 10,
and in image/camera mode, they are 400, 25, and 10, respectively. The output layer sizes
are dynamic, as they change when new characters are learned.
Typically, a large number of training examples is used. This is usually proportional to the
input layer size. In our example, it may generally seem reasonable to train the networks on
thousands of examples. However, we have designed the system to learn progressively and
save new examples after prediction. Also, every user has a different handwriting style, so
collecting a large number of examples would require to collect data from many sources. In
order to simplify this, we have only provided 40 examples per digit in the initial training
set, leaving it up to the user to produce new examples. The application facilitates this
process.

27

3.2.3 Offline and Online Learning

Offline and online learning have already been defined in the overview chapter as eager and
lazy leaning mechanisms, respectively. As the specification denotes, both mechanisms
have to be implemented in our application in order to be able to learn progressively based
on user's feedback, as well as perform offline learning on persistent data at any time.
The preferred algorithm for offline learning is RPROP because of the described advantages
over pure backpropagation. It is evident the algorithm is superior to backpropagation and
other learning algorithms as shown in (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Average number of required epochs

in different learning problem scenarios. It is
apparent that RPROP is superior to
backpropagation (BP), as far fewer epochs are
required to converge to a local minimum of the
cost function [4].
However, RPROP is not an online learning algorithmit wouldn't make sense to perform
as single learning iteration, because no weight update acceleration or deceleration occurs.
In effect, using RPROP for online learning would be equal to using backpropagation if
initial weight update value of RPROP is equal to the learning rate of backpropagation.
Therefore, pure backpropagation has been chosen to perform online learning.
For backpropagation, we have set the learning rate to 0.3. For RPROP, the initial weight
update size is 0.01,

has been set to the traditional value of 0.5, and

+ is equal to

1.2. After testing the performance of the algorithms, we have decided not to use
regularization at all (the regularization parameter is 0). Both backpropagation and RPROP
perform 100 optimization epochs.

28

3.2.4 Used Technologies

We have developed a native Android application using Java SE Runtime Environment 6,
the Java programming language, and Android SDK. This is the traditional way to build
Android applications and does not rely on a third party. The application has been targeted
at Android 4.2.2, however, Android 2.2 and up should be supported.
Having explained the algorithms used in multilayer perceptrons, we have decided to
implement machine learning on matrix-level only using a library for matrix manipulations,
avoiding existing machine learning libraries. For this, we have used a subset of the JAMA
Java package that deals with matrices.
Because image preprocessing is not the primary focus of this work, we haven't
implemented these algorithms from scratchinstead, we have used the OpenCV library
for Android. This library contains algorithms for computer vision in general. Omitting its
machine learning capabilities, we have used this to perform image preprocessing steps in
the image and camera modes of the application.
To prototype, test, and evaluate algorithms, we have used the GNU Octave language. This
approach allowed us to produce statistics and plots useful for configuring the network
architecture and debugging the algorithms.

29

4. Implementation
In this chapter, we will describe how the Android application requirements have been
satisfied, document the implementation, describe the problems we've run into and how they
were solved and provide a brief user guide in the process.

4.1 Android Application Implementation

The main entry point of the application is a navigation activity. Being one of four main
building blocks of Android applications, activities are single, focused things that the user
can do [17]. They usually appear as windows containing user interface elements that the
user can interact with. Our navigation activity contains buttons to access other activities
input mode, camera mode, image mode, and character list. Thus, this activity is required in
order to be able to satisfy R01, R02, R03, and R04.
The touch mode activity is designed to implement features required in R01. The main piece
of user interface it contains is a custom view object that facilitates the drawing of
characters. A view is any single piece of user interface that can be shown to the user. This
view records a path made of individual strokes the user makes and a stroke end point
bitmap as described in the solution plan. It also contains two buttons: Clear and
Predict. The clear button simply clears the drawing, while the predict button initiates the
input mode recognition pipeline. The character's bounding box is marked with a rectangle
and the prediction is shown to the user in form of a dialog. This dialog presents three
buttons: Cancel, Correction, and OK. Cancel intuitively closes the dialog and doesn't
interact with the neural network at all. When the correction button is clicked, the dialog
asks the user for the correct label in case the drawing has been misclassified. This initiates
the online learning algorithm, where backpropagation is performed on this single example,
only performing one iteration. The label provided by the user is used in the learning
process. The OK button does the same, but instead of asking the user for the correct
label, the predicted label is used.
Each time the activity goes into background, or the system decides to destroy it, the
perceptron state is saved to external storage. This covers requirements R01.1 and R01.3.

30

By default, each time a prediction is made, the drawing and the stroke end bitmaps are
saved to external storage as image files in pairs, so that perceptron weights can be removed
and offline learning can be performed. This behavior satisfies R01.2 and can be turned off
in application settings to save memory when no or only online learning is required.
The camera mode contains an OpenCV user interface element tailored for showing and
processing camera frames in Android. When the user enters the activity, they are
immediately presented with continuously updated camera images, which are processed
according to the image mode recognition pipeline as has been described. Individual
contours that are likely to be characters are found and marked with rectangles. A predicted
label is shown above each such rectangle. In practice, a Nexus S device with a single-core
1GHz CPU (the GPU is, unfortunately, not used by the implementation of the OpenCV
library which would have likely performed better) and a camera resolution of 720x480
pixels, the updating frequency is approximately 2 frames per second. This depends on the
number of objects visible in the frames. In order to filter out contours with a low
probability of correct classification, contours that cover an area of less than 40 pixels are
not further processed. This significantly improves the framerate, as there are usually many
objects in the image that are too large to be filtered by the median blur, but still unwanted.
In this mode, the user can click on the individual characters outlined by the mentioned
rectangles in order to provide feedback. The feedback dialog described in the touch mode
is reused. Corrections of the predictions are immediately visible in the next frames; as
such, this activity may resemble an application of augmented reality. As with the touch
mode, the neural network state is also saved when the activity goes into background or is
killed by the system.
When implementing the camera mode activity, a problem with the choice of segmentation
threshold value arose. OpenCV provides the use of Otsu's method, which automatically
determines the threshold value. However, this hasn't proved to be useful, as it is
computationally more expensive and the choice of threshold values still hasn't been
optimal. We have realized the best way to address this problem would be to leave the
setting of the threshold value to the user, being equal to 100 (in the range 0-255) by
default. For this, we have used a panel with a segmentation check-box that allows users to
see the segmented image, and a seekbar (a UI element for contiguous value selection) to
control the threshold.
31

When the user enters the image mode, they are instructed to start by opening an image file.
The system then shows all possible applications that can handle this request; a default
gallery application is preferred, as these usually implement the behavior of providing data
correctly, however, other applications, such as file managers, may also be used. The loaded
image file is processed according to the image mode recognition pipeline using the same
techniques as in camera mode, and is then shown to the user. The segmentation control
views are also present. Because this activity would share a lot of source code with the
camera activity, methods that could be reasonably separated from the classes have been
moved to a public class and declared as static.
Unlike in the camera activity, which is constrained to the landscape screen orientation, we
wanted to make this activity flexible. It can be rotated, while its state is retained in a
fragment, which represents a portion of a user interface or a behavior of an activity [17].
The last activity from the four navigation elements is a character list that satisfies R04. It
shows a grid view of learned characters, filling the items with saved bitmaps if present.
When the user selects an item in the grid view, they are taken into the touch mode activity
that is modified to focus on training the single character label. The difference is that no
feedback dialog is shown to the userit is assumed that the character the user selected in
the character list is always the anticipated label and online learning is performed after each
prediction. Otherwise, the activity is unchanged; the examples are still saved to external
storage if set to do so in the settings and the network state is saved in appropriate events.
The character list activity also contains a menu item for adding a new character as required
in R05. After being selected, the user is asked to assign a label to the new character and is
then taken into the touch input activity to train the new character as described above. This
action adds the character to the list of known characters and modifies the structure of the
perceptron used for touch input recognition. In particular, the output layer size is increased
by one (to be able to predict the new class) and weight connections to this layer are
adjusted and initialized to random values.
Because the application maintains two separate perceptrons, the one used for image and
camera recognition is also modified in this way, but only when the user navigates to the
related activities. The online learning that was performed when training the new character
using touch input is, however, not applied to this perceptron. The user can only train it
32

using online learning in the related activities, or by performing offline learning in the case
that the bitmaps for the new character have been saved.
So far, we have mentioned the application settings only in relation to the option of saving
character bitmaps. Settings are another activity that the user can access from any other
activity at any time. Here, besides the saving option, the user is able to pick the error
minimization algorithm used for offline learning: backpropagation or RPROP, the latter
being the default. The initial learning rate to perform the online learning iteration (using
backpropagation) is 0.3, but if the user feels the need to adjust this parameter, they may do
it here. Finally, the settings contain items that initiate the offline learning process for touchbased and image-based input recognition that satisfy R06.
To make it easy for a user to start using the application, and out-of-the-box experience is
required. The application package contains initial files with a set of image bitmaps, saved
perceptron weights and the list of known characters. These files are compressed in a single
zip file that the application extracts and copies to external storage. To counter the
possibility of injecting malicious files in the zip file, its SHA-1 checksum is verified before
the file is processed.
As the android development guidelines dictate [17], long operations such as file input and
output or offline machine learning should be executed in separate threads. It is preferred to
use the AsyncTask class, which is a thread wrapper that allows simple communication back
to the main application thread. However, when the activity in which an AsyncTask is
started is released from memory, nothing stops the system from killing the leftover thread
that may be performing a critical operation. To ensure such threads keep running, we have
created a service for copying the initial files, and another one that handles offline learning
of both neural networks. These services have been declared foreground, which guarantees
the system will only reclaim the memory if it is required to keep the user interface
responsive [17].
Additionally, when an Android device runs on its battery, the execution of threads may be
interrupted when the device is in sleep mode. As the learning process takes a few minutes
to complete, it should continue to run even after the power button of the device is pressed.
For this, we acquire a partial wake lock. This is a mechanism that controls the power state
of the device. When a partial wake lock is acquired, the device's screen and keyboard
33

backlight are allowed to be turned off, but the CPU is kept on until all partial wake locks
have been released [17].

4.2 Android Application Source Code

The application source code is composed of Java classes arranged in packages. Here, we
will take a brief look at the packages and describe the classes. The complete source code
documentation, along with the source code of the Android application and GNU Octave
scripts, see the content included on the enclosed DVD.
The list of packages is as follows:
1. eu.uhliarik.charrec.gui.activities
2. eu.uhliarik.charrec.gui.adapters
3. eu.uhliarik.charrec.gui.dialogs
4. eu.uhliarik.charrec.gui.fragments
5. eu.uhliarik.charrec.gui.models
6. eu.uhliarik.charrec.gui.views
7. eu.uhliarik.charrec.learning
8. eu.uhliarik.charrec.services
9. eu.uhliarik.charrec.utils
10. eu.uhliarik.mlp
11. jama
Package 1, activities, contains the activities that have already been described in 4.1.
The adapters package contains an adapter class GridItemAdapter, which is used to fill the
character list grid view.
The

dialogs

package

consists

of

four

dialog

classes:

AboutDialog,

ChooseCharacterDialog, ExternalStorageDialog, and PredictionDialog. These build the

dialog components used throughout the application and maintain listeners for button click
events.
The fourth package, fragments, contains a GridViewFragment class that is required in the
implementation of the character list grid view so that its state is retained across activity
lifetime. Also, the ImageCharacterFragment can be found here, which is used for retaining
the state of the image view in the image recognition activity.
34

The models package comprises CharacterGridItemModel, which is a class that holds a

bitmap and a label of a character used in the character list.
We have created two custom views in the views package, namely CharacterGridView and
CharacterView. The CharacterGridView class extends GridView and adds a few methods
to facilitate the use of the class. GridView extends the View class and is the main
component of the touch input mode. Its main task is to override the onDraw and
onTouchEvent methods to interact with the user and allow them to draw on the view's
canvas.
The eu.uhliarik.charrec.learning package contains the CharacterMlp class that extends a
MultilayerPerceptron in the eu.uhliarik.mlp package and is used throughout the application
as the main learning model.
The Android services described earlier in this chapter can be found in the
eu.uhliarik.charrec.services package: TrainingService and TransferService. The former
performs offline learning of the neural networks, while the latter manages transfer of the
initial data when the application is used for the first time.
Code that would otherwise have been shared by several classes has been separated to the
FileUtils and ImageUtils classes in the eu.uhliarik.charrec.utils package. Intuitively,
FileUtils contains public static methods that deal with saving and loading perceptron data,
extracting files from the compressed initial data file, and more. ImageUtils, on the other
hand, deals with loading and converting the dataset (character bitmaps), bitmap
manipulations, bitmap matrix format conversions, and image preprocessing algorithms.
Package 10 is placed outside of the eu.uhliarik.charrec package, as it is meant to be used
by any application, not only in our project. It consists of classes that implement the
multilayer perceptron in a loose coupling fashion. The main class, MultilayerPerceptron,
can be used alone, but it is suggested that it be extended by a class that is designed to solve
a specific problem. The CharacterMlp class mentioned in package 7 is an example of such
implementation.
Finally, jama is an external package containing the Matrix class that provides a referential
implementation of matrix manipulations. We have modified this class, adding new methods
required when implementing the learning algorithms described in chapter 2.

35

5. Results
Before implementing the learning algorithms in Java, we have tested them as prototypes
using GNU Octave. This allowed us to easily collect results of how well the learning
algorithms perform. This chapter presents and discusses the comparison of the collected
results.

5.1 Collection Methods

We have measured the performance of the algorithms used in multilayer perceptrons:
backpropagation and resilient propagation. We have considered the scenario of recognition
from image, where the dataset consists only of 40 character image bitmaps per character.
For this comparison, the datasets are only comprised of characters of digits, therefore the
size of the dataset contains 400 examples.
For relevant values, we have split the dataset into training and validation sets, with the
ratio being 7:3. Also, before using the learning algorithms, the dataset has been randomly
shuffled.
The error rates have been obtained using a logarithmic cost function shown in (2.7).
The configuration of the learning model whose results are presented here is:

The regularization parameter is 0.

The number of epochs is 100.

In backpropagation, the learning rate is 0.3.

In resilient backpropagation, ,

+ , and 0 are 0.5, 1.2, and 0.01,

respectively.

The perceptron architectures are as described in the plan of solution.

This configuration has been chosen based on recommendations from various resources that
have been referred to in the explanation of individual model characteristics, and testing, the
results of which would be too long to fit in this chapter.

36

5.1 Result Comparison

We have measured the error of the backpropagation and RPROP algorithms on the training
and validation sets. This has been tested using fractions of the dataset of various sizes and a
learning curve has been plotted. Learning curve represents error as a function of the dataset
size and is a perfect tool to visualize high bias or variance.

Figure 11: Learning curve of backpropagation performed on the training and

validation sets.

37

Figure 12: Learning curve of RPROP performed on the training and validation
sets.

In the learning curves, no significant overfitting or underfitting is apparent. We can see that
the RPROP algorithm manages to converge to a better minimum given 100 epochs than
backpropagation. This is caused by the advantages of the RPROP algorithm to pure
backpropagation that we explained earlier in this work. Table 1 confirms these findings.
Algorithm

Training
set error
(m=400)

Validation
set error
(m=400)

Avg. training
set error

Avg.
validation
set error

Training set
accuracy

Backpropagation

1.201

1.396

1.177

1.529

96.25%

RPROP

0.020

0.320

0.019

0.331

100.00%

Table 1: Comparison of learning algorithms; 'm' represents the number of examples

used for training. The average error values are measured across the 'x' axis of the
learning curve, omitting values where m 40, as the validation set error is expected to
be high in both algorithms.

38

6. Conclusion
This work has mostly been focused on the machine learning methods used in the project.
At first, we reviewed the approaches that are nowadays used in similar applications. After
that, we delved into the inner workings of a multilayer perceptron, focusing on
backpropagation and resilient back, which has been implemented an the Android
application. With the knowledge we had described, we specified the requirements of the
project and planned the solution. During the development of the application, we ran into a
few problems, which, along with the application structure and details, have been described
in the implementation chapter. Finally, the results of the implementation of the learning
algorithms have been compared.
The Android application performs character recognition based on touch, image, and
camera input. We have developed a Java package containing classes that implement the
multilayer perceptron learning model, which can also be used in other applications due to
its modular design that supports the loose coupling principle. The application itself uses
this package in such way.
Several improvements for the application or the learning model used within can be
suggested. For example, the feature extraction performed by the neural network could be
constrained to operate on more strictly preprocessed data. Also, several classifiers learning
on different features could be combined to make the system more robust. Additionally, an
unsupervised clustering learning model, such as an ART network [7], could be used on the
raw input, whose output would be connected to a multilayer perceptron.

39

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Appendices
Appendix A: DVD
The enclosed DVD contains an electronic copy of this text, source codes of the Android
application and GNU Octave scripts, Java source code documentation of the Android
application, and an Android package for installation of the Android application.

Appendix B: Android Application Screenshots

Screenshot 1: Android
application navigation screen

Screenshot 2: Android
application touch mode screen

Screenshot 3: Android application camera mode

screen