Speech Recognition Article Classification Working with Chaos Chemical Drawings Sequence Prediction BrainMaker Neural Networks Recognize Chemical Drawings Pattern recognition is a commonly encountered problem when computers are required to get information the from the physical world around them. Recent advances in commercially available optical character recognition software have provided some affordable solutions, particularly when fonts are similar and the material is relatively clean. Blind people can even purchase a scanner and software which will read aloud to them. However, there are still real limits to what most commercial software can recognize. Most have difficulty when the print is sloppy, small or varies considerably.
None offer the ability to recognize arbitrary shapes, symbols or graphics.
Even though they are primarily interested in hand-written digits, the techniques developed are general. Feature extraction from bitmaps is the biggest problem. A connection table can be easily stored on computer, but most printed sources such as books, journals and papers use the more easily recognized drawings. The connection tables uniquely define compounds and can be used to index information in a database. When chemical compound descriptions are placed in a database with other information they can be used for patent searches, environmental studies, toxicology studies, and precursor searching, for example.