Patent ID: 7003158

Claim:
A handwritten character recognition network for inferring parts of handwriting from visual observations with a common hidden variable having plural discrete states, comprising: at least one mixture of Bayesian networks (MBN) that encodes probabilities of observing the visual observations corresponding to a handwritten character, the probabilities employed for inferring parts of handwriting; the MBN comprising: a plurality of hypothesis-specific Bayesian networks (HSBNs), each of the HSBNs encoding probabilities of observing the visual observations corresponding to a handwritten character and given the common hidden variable being in a respective one of its states; a first aggregator that combines outputs of the HSBNs to produce an MBN output of the MBN; each one of the HSBNs comprises: plural nodes, each of the plural nodes corresponding to an associated visual observation element, and at least some of the plural nodes having dependencies with others of the plural nodes within the one HSBN, a second aggregator connected to outputs of the nodes of the one HSBN to provide the output of the one HSBN, the nodes having inputs that receive the state of a respective one of the visual observation elements of a current one of the visual observations.