Logan Kearsley

Program Description

I now have three main programs- AlphaTrain, CharConvert, and CharRec.

AlphaTrain generates the networks for each character and does some minimal initial training; the latter probably isn't necessary, but it allows for a slight speed increase in later training.

CharConvert takes an ASCII textfile as input and generates an image file that the neural network character recognition program can use.

CharRec is the main important bit of the project. It can run in three modes- Automatic Transcription, Supervised Learning, and Automatic Learning. Automatic Transcription takes an image file and outputs an ASCII text file of the transcript; it is meant to be used with an already fully-trained set of networks. Supervised Learning prints each character image individually and requests user confirmation so as to be able to continuously train the network and allow the user to correct any errors. Automatic Transcription behaves almost the same as Supervised Transcription, but rather than asking for user input at every step it takes an ASCII file containing the correct transcription as input to compare with its transcription, and automatically re-runs the transcription until it reaches a certain level of accuracy; it then offers the user the option of continuing the training to further improve accuracy.

My progress since the beginning of 3rd quarter has been to make all of that work. I started out with little more than a few test programs to prove that individual networks using my code library actually worked.