Classified Vector Quantisation and population decoding for pattern recognition

Learning Vector Quantisation (LVQ) is a method of applying the Vector Quantisation (VQ) to generate references for Nearest Neighbour (NN) classification. Though successful in many occasions, LVQ suffers from several shortcomings, especially the reference vectors are prone to diverge. In this paper, we propose a Classified Vector Quantisation (CVQ) to establish VQ for classification. By CVQ, each data category is represented by its own codebook, which can be implemented by some learning algorithms. In classification process, each codebook offers a generalised NN. The examples of handwritten digit recognition and offline signature verification are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.