A Large-Scale Neural Network Which Recognizes Handwritten Kanji Characters

We propose a new way to construct a large-scale neural network for 3.000 handwritten Kanji characters recognition. This neural network consists of 3 parts: a collection of small-scale networks which are trained individually on a small number of Kanji characters; a network which integrates the output from the small-scale networks, and a process to facilitate the integration of these neworks. The recognition rate of the total system is comparable with those of the small-scale networks. Our results indicate that the proposed method is effective for constructing a large-scale network without loss of recognition performance.