SKEDSOFT

Usage & Application: Pattern recognition is used in any area of science and engineering that studies the structure of observations. It is now frequently used in many applications in manufacturing industry, health care and military. Examples include:

• Optical character recognition (OCR) is becoming an integral part of document scanners, and is also used frequently in banking and postal applications. Printed characters can now be accurately recognized, and the improving performance of automatic recognition of handwritten cursive characters has diminished significantly the need of human interaction for OCR tasks.
• Automatic speech recognition is very important for user interaction with machines. Commercial systems for automatic response to flight queries, telephone directory assistance and telebanking are available. Often the systems are tuned to a specific speaker for better recognition accuracy.
• Computer vision deals with the recognition of objects as well as the identification and localization of their three-dimensional environments. This capability is required, for example, by robots to operate in dynamic or unknown environments. This can be useful from applications ranging from manufacturing to household cleaning, and even for rescue missions.
• Personal identification systems that use biometrics are very important for security applications in airports, ATMs, shops, hotels, and secure computer access. Recognition can be based on face, fingerprint, iris or voice, and can be combined with the automatic verification of signatures and PIN codes.
• Recognition of objects on earth from the sky (by satellites) or from the air (by airplanes and cruise missiles), is called remote sensing. It is important for cartography, agricultural inspection, detection of minerals and pollution, and target recognition.
• Many tests for medical diagnosis utilize pattern recognition systems, from counting blood cells and recognition of cell tissues through microscopes to the detection of tumors in magnetic resonance scans and the inspection of bones and joints in X-ray images.
• Many large databases are stored on the repositories accessible via Internet or otherwise in local computers. They may have a clear structure such as bank accounts, a weak structure such as consumer behavior, or no obvious structure such as a collection of images. Procedures for finding desired items (database retrieval) as well as to learn or discover structures in databases (data mining) are becoming more and more important. Web search engines and recommender systems are two example applications.

Example of pattern recognition application with its input pattern and pattern class.