Dual-Memory Model for Incremental Learning: The Handwriting Recognition Use Case

In this paper, we propose a dual memory model inspired by psychological theory. Short-term memory processes the data stream before integrating them into long-term memory, which generalizes. The use case is learning the ability to recognize handwriting. This begins with the learning of prototypical letters. It continues throughout life and gives the individual the ability to recognize increasingly varied handwriting. This second task is achieved by incrementally training our dual-memory model. We used a convolution network for encoding and random forests as the memory model. Indeed, the latter have the advantage of being easily enhanced to integrate new data and new classes. Performances on the MNIST database are very encouraging since they exceed 95% and the complexity of the model remains reasonable.