TR-A-0156 :1992.11.27

Shigeru Katagiri, Biing-Hwang Juang, Alain Biem

DISCRIMINATIVE FEATURE EXTRACTION

Abstract:Pattern recognition consists of two main stages: feature extraction and classification. Needless to say, these two constituent processes should be designed systematically in a manner consistent with accurate recognition. However, such consistency has not yet been achieved in pattern recognition methods up to now. We thus propose in this paper a novel solution to this important long standing problem. The proposed method is mainly based on a recent discriminative learning theory, the Minimum Classification Error formalization and the Generalized Probabilistic Descent method, and referred to as Discriminative Feature Extraction. A key idea of Discriminative Feature Extraction is to embed both procedures of feature extraction and classification in a smooth functional form and consistently design both stages so as to reduce the number of misclassifications. An application of the method to speech recognition clearly shows the great promise of this new approach.