Class-specific feature polynomial classifier for pattern classification and its application to handwritten numeral recognition

The polynomial classifier (PC) that takes the binomial terms of reduced subspace features as inputs has shown superior performance to multilayer neural networks in pattern classification. In this paper, we propose a class-specific feature polynomial classifier (CFPC) that extracts class-specific features from class-specific subspaces, unlike the ordinary PC that uses a class-independent subspace. The CFPC can be viewed as a hybrid of ordinary PC and projection distance method. The class-specific features better separate one class from the others, and the incorporation of class-specific projection distance further improves the separability. The connecting weights of CFPC are efficiently learned class-by-class to minimize the mean square error on training samples. To justify the promise of CFPC, we have conducted experiments of handwritten digit recognition and numeral string recognition on the NIST Special Database 19 (SD19). The digit recognition task was also benchmarked on two standard databases USPS and MNIST. The results show that the performance of CFPC is superior to that of ordinary PC, and is competitive with support vector classifiers (SVCs).