A novel cascade ensemble classifier system with a high recognition performance on handwritten digits

This paper presents a novel cascade ensemble classifier system for the recognition of handwritten digits. This new system aims at attaining a very high recognition rate and a very high reliability at the same time, in other words, achieving an excellent recognition performance of handwritten digits. The trade-offs among recognition, error, and rejection rates of the new recognition system are analyzed. Three solutions are proposed: (i) extracting more discriminative features to attain a high recognition rate, (ii) using ensemble classifiers to suppress the error rate and (iii) employing a novel cascade system to enhance the recognition rate and to reduce the rejection rate. Based on these strategies, seven sets of discriminative features and three sets of random hybrid features are extracted and used in the different layers of the cascade recognition system. The novel gating networks (GNs) are used to congregate the confidence values of three parallel artificial neural networks (ANNs) classifiers. The weights of the GNs are trained by the genetic algorithms (GAs) to achieve the overall optimal performance. Experiments conducted on the MNIST handwritten numeral database are shown with encouraging results: a high reliability of 99.96% with minimal rejection, or a 99.59% correct recognition rate without rejection in the last cascade layer.