Comparison of Human and Machine Word Recognition

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10 (NIPS 1997)

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Authors

Markus Schenkel, Cyril Latimer, Marwan Jabri

Abstract

We present a study which is concerned with word recognition rates for heavily degraded documents. We compare human with machine read(cid:173) ing capabilities in a series of experiments, which explores the interaction of word/non-word recognition, word frequency and legality of non-words with degradation level. We also study the influence of character segmen(cid:173) tation, and compare human performance with that of our artificial neural network model for reading. We found that the proposed computer model uses word context as efficiently as humans, but performs slightly worse on the pure character recognition task.