Preselection of support vector candidates by relative neighborhood graph for large-scale character recognition

We propose a pre-selection method for training support vector machines (SVM) with a large-scale dataset. Specifically, the proposed method selects patterns around the class boundary and the selected data is fed to train an SVM. For the selection, that is, searching for boundary patterns, we utilize a relative neighborhood graph (RNG). An RNG has an edge for each pair of neighboring patterns and thus, we can find boundary patterns by looking for edges connecting patterns from different classes. Through large-scale handwritten digit pattern recognition experiments, we show that the proposed pre-selection method accelerates SVM training process 5–15 times faster without degrading recognition accuracy.