Computer recognition of unconstrained handwritten numerals

This paper proposes a simple yet highly accurate system for the recognition or unconstrained handwritten numerals. It starts with an examination of the basic characteristic loci (CL) features used along with a nearest neighbor classifier achieving a recognition rate of 90.5%. We then illustrate how the basic CL implementation can be extended and used in conjunction with a multilayer perception neural network classifier to increase the recognition rate to 98%. This proposed recognition system was tested on a totally unconstrained handwritten numeral database while training it with only 600 samples exclusive from the test set. An accuracy exceeding 98% is also expected if a larger training set is used. Lastly, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system its performance is also compared to that of some other common recognition schemes. These systems use moment Invariants as features along with nearest neighbor classification schemes.