High-speed character recognition using a dual cellular neural network architecture (CNND)

An effective character recognition procedure implemented on a new type of hardware system and using a new architecture called CNND is proposed. This CNND contains one or more analog cellular neural networks (CNNs) and some digital logic, combining the advantages of the fast analog CNN signal processing and the fast and easy decision capability of digital logic. It is shown that the CNND system can be used for recognition of multifont printed or handwritten characters and could recognize 100,000 char/s with a recognition rate of more than 95%. The more advantage of the system over competing types is that there is not an extra feature extraction procedure implemented in slow hardware