A new end-to-end semi-supervised deep learning framework for mastering robot-written character identification

Abstract

This paper studies the robot-written character identification problem under an end-to-end semi-supervised deep learning framework consisting of semi-supervised learning and deep learning modules. The learning framework allows a deep neural network to be trained on labeled and pseudo-labeled samples where pseudo-labeled samples refer to the samples with labels predicted by the semi-supervised learning module. Moreover, to guarantee the feasibility of the learning framework, a two-stage strategy is proposed for training the deep neural network. Specifically, the two-stage training strategy adopts pseudo-labeled samples firstly to train a deep neural network, then the deep neural network is refined using labeled samples one more time. As a result, more samples can be used for training a deep neural network, which is significant to the performance improvement of a deep neural network in the case of inadequate labeled samples. More importantly, the deep neural networks trained under the proposed learning framework perform better than the famous deep neural networks in a robot-written character identification experiment.