Evolutionary Prototyping for Handwriting Recognition

A new prototyping method based on the evolutionary computation paradigm and on the concept of Vector Quantization is proposed. It uses a specifically devised evolutionary algorithm for evolving a set of prototype feature vectors and does not require any a-priori knowledge about neither the actual number of prototypes nor the statistical properties of the input data. Experiments performed by using both synthetic data and handwritten digits randomly extracted from the NIST database have confirmed the effectiveness of the approach.