Geoffrey E Hinton, Michael Revow and Peter Dayan Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
We construct a mixture of locally linear generative models of a collection of pixel-based images of digits, and use them for recognition. Different models of a given digit are used to capture different styles of writing, and new images are classified by evaluating their log-likelihoods under each model. We use an EM-based algorithm in which the M-step is computationally straightforward principal components analysis (PCA). Incorporating tangent-plane information about expected local deformations only requires adding tangent vectors into the sample covariance matrices for the PCA, and it demonstrably improves performance.