Building Up of a Pen Oriented Human-Software Interface with Complex-Valued Spiking Machines

A CVSM (Complex-Valued Spiking Machine) is a tool intended for the processing of spatio-temporal patterns. This machine is built by assembling spiking neural networks named STANNs (Spatio-Temporal Artificial Neural Networks). The potentialities of the latter have been studied for several years in the field of human-computer interactions (handwritten character recognition, lip-reading and speech recognition). Whereas this field makes the object of a renewed interest with the development of mobile telephony and that of the personal digital assistants, the purpose of the experiment described in this paper was to evaluate the CVSM on an industrial application (it had been studied until then only in simulation). This application, designed to carry out the capture of electronic forms with a pen oriented interface, was done by students of Supelec for the account of France Telecom R&D. In addition to the results in handwritten character recognition, a detailed attention was granted during this study to the facility to integrate this technique in the traditional steps of a software development cycle.