Selective Attention for Handwritten Digit Recognition

Completely parallel object recognition is NP-complete. Achieving a recognizer with feasible complexity requires a compromise between parallel and sequential processing where a system selectively focuses on parts of a given image, one after another. Successive fixations are generated to sample the image and these samples are processed and abstracted to generate a temporal context in which results are integrated over time. A computational model based on a partially recurrent feedforward network is proposed and made credible by testing on the real-world problem of recognition of handwritten digits with encouraging results.