Local context in non-linear deformation models for handwritten character recognition

We evaluate different two-dimensional non-linear deformation models for handwritten character recognition. Starting from a true two-dimensional model, we derive pseudo-two-dimensional and zero-order deformation models. Experiments show that it is most important to include suitable representations of the local image context of each pixel to increase performance. With these methods, we achieve very competitive results across five different tasks, in particular 0.5% error rate on the MNIST task.