Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 

ECSE 35-6610 Pattern Recognition - Fall 2004

Teusday & Friday 2:00 - 3:20   Carnegie 102 (?)

Instructor..................................................................... Professor George Nagy (nagy@ecse.rpi.edu)

Office hours........................... Tuesday & Thursday 11:00 - 1:00, or by appointment, JEC 6020, 276-6078

Prerequisites.................................................................................. Probability; programming skill

Grading..................................................................................... 5 programming assignments 50%

                                                                                             Term paper (due October 15) 10%

                                                                                       Midterm examination (October 19) 15%

                                                                                     Final (as scheduled by the Registrar) 25%

Text........................................................... Duda, Hart and Stork, Pattern Classification,  Wiley 2001


Topics

Linear and nonlinear decision procedures

Parametric and nonparametric classifiers

Adaptation and non-supervised learning

Feature extraction and selection

Parameter estimation and performance evaluation (bias and variance)

Clustering, mixture distributions, Expectation Maximization

Linguistic and style context, Hidden Markov Methods

Applications to Optical Character Recognition


All of the programming assignments will be based on a file of optically scanned typeset characters,
which we will use to compare the performance of various classification algorithms.


Course objective

On completion of the course, students should be sufficiently familiar with the formal theoretical structure, notation, and vocabulary of pattern recognition to be able to pursue matters of interest in the current technical literature. They will also understand some of the engineering aspects of a prototypical application of pattern recognition, Optical Character Recognition. 


Examinations will be open book, but Cheating (copying on examinations or programs) will result in a grade of F for the course Discussing programming assignments between students is encouraged., but each team  must write a separate program, and a separate report Assignments up to one week late will be given half marks Assignments more than one week late will not be accepted. Special considerations will, however, be given to special situations, such as the DQE: they must be negotiated in advance Grades may be appealed initially to Professor Nagy: if the difficulty cannot be resolved, procedures in the Rensselaer Handbook must be followed.

35-661 Assignments and Due Dates 

All assignment due at the beginning of the class!

1 Moment feature extraction from printed characters....................................... 9-17

2 Bayes classifier for binary and Gaussian distributions................................... 10-1

3 Term paper.................................................................................... 10-15

MIDTERM                                                                            10-19

4 Nearest-neighbors classifier................................................................. 10-29

5 Decision tree classifier....................................................................... 11-12

6 Clustering and unsupervised learning....................................................... 12-3

FINAL                                                       scheduled by the Registrar