Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is a type of neural network output and associated scoring function, for training

recurrent neural network A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic ...

s (RNNs) such as

LSTM Long short-term memory (LSTM) is an artificial neural network used in the fields of artificial intelligence and deep learning. Unlike standard feedforward neural networks, LSTM has feedback connections. Such a recurrent neural network (RNN) ca ...

networks to tackle sequence problems where the timing is variable. It can be used for tasks like on-line

handwriting recognition Handwriting recognition (HWR), also known as handwritten text recognition (HTR), is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other dev ...

or recognizing phones in speech audio. CTC refers to the outputs and scoring, and is independent of the underlying neural network structure. It was introduced in 2006. The input is a sequence of observations, and the outputs are a sequence of labels, which can include blank outputs. The difficulty of training comes from there being many more observations than there are labels. For example in speech audio there can be multiple time slices which correspond to a single phoneme. Since we don't know the alignment of the observed sequence with the target labels we predict a probability distribution at each time step. A CTC network has a continuous output (e.g. softmax), which is fitted through training to model the probability of a label. CTC does not attempt to learn boundaries and timings: Label sequences are considered equivalent if they differ only in alignment, ignoring blanks. Equivalent label sequences can occur in many ways – which makes scoring a non-trivial task, but there is an efficient

forward–backward algorithm The forward–backward algorithm is an inference algorithm for hidden Markov models which computes the posterior marginals of all hidden state variables given a sequence of observations/emissions o_:= o_1,\dots,o_T, i.e. it computes, for all h ...

for that. CTC scores can then be used with the back-propagation algorithm to update the neural network weights. Alternative approaches to a CTC-fitted neural network include a

hidden Markov model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it X — with unobservable ("''hidden''") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an ob ...

(HMM).

References

{{reflist Artificial neural networks