On binary similarity measures for handwritten character recognition

Similarity and dissimilarity measures play an important role in pattern classification and clustering. For a century, researchers have searched for a good measure. Here, we review, categorize, and evaluate various binary vector similarity/dissimilarity measures for character recognition. One of the most contentious disputes in the similarity measure selection problem is whether the measure includes or excludes negative matches. While inner-product based similarity measures consider only positive matches, other conventional measures credit both positive and negative matches equally. Hence, we propose an enhanced similarity measure that gives variable credits and show that it is superior to conventional measures in an offline handwritten character recognition application. Finally, the proposed similarity measure can be further boosted by applying weights and we demonstrate that it outperforms the weighted Hamming distance.