Handwritten digit

recognition
By Levit Gregory
INTRODUCTION
 The subject of
“Handwritten digit
recognition” is of
great concern and
has many
applications in
various fields like
zip code
recognition.
 Handwritten
digit recognition

The statistical The semantic The voting

approach approach Algorithms
 Reasons for choosing statistical
approach

 No usage of large training database is

required.
 Low running time.
 Without resorting to neural-nets.
 Not many applications in the field of hand
written digit recognition are done by
statistical approach (only few articles deal
with statistical method).
 Statistical approach
one is searching for the statistical characteristics of
various digits, these characteristics could be very
simple, like:
 the ratio of black pixels to white pixels,

E.g. an image of the digit "1" will have relatively

fewer black pixels than an image of the digit "8"
though both are drawn to the same scale
 Continuing the same approach, cursory analysis
shows that the ratio of height to width for the
digit "0" is less than the same ratio for the digit
"6“.
 by careful analysis of the histograms of various
digits, it is possible to differentiate between
them.
 Principles of my method
 For example, take the following binary image of
the number 8 (already cropped).
 First I draw 5 horizontal rays through the image
(spacing is determined on the fly, depending on
size of cropped image). The number of
intersections along each ray is recorded.
 Similarly 5 vertical rays are shot and recorded...

 Finally the Euler number (Scalar whose value is

the total number of objects in the image minus
the total number of holes in those objects) is
recorded in the last array entry.
 This recorded array can be regarded as an
vector in the intersection space (I-space), I
use 11 dimension space (10 intersecting lines
+ 1 Euler number).
 In the I-space there are 10 constant vectors
composing the training set, those vectors are
acquired from 10 default images kept in the
programs data base. Each one of the vector
represent a digit from ‘0’ to ‘9’.
 A new input image is projected to I space,
thus converted to a vector.
 The algorithm then finds the distance
between the new vector and the 10 constant
vectors.
 The minimal distance will give the best
matching to one of the constant vectors. The
recognition answer will be the digit
represented by the constant vector.
 Examples and Results

 For training set I created an example of each

digit 0-9 using ms-paint.
For testing I created 3 groups of 0-9 digit images
also in ms-paint. I tried to make each group more
different, and assigned different image
characteristics to each of them; like image size,
marker size and handwriting style.
 Conclusions
 70% success.
 Problematic pairs of digits have similar profile as
can be seen from results table; ‘4’ and ‘1’, ‘7’ and
‘1’, ‘6’ and ‘8’.

NOT Orientation/Rotation invariant.
 Writing styles matter (weird 7's or incomplete
zeros).
 Salt and pepper noise can throw off results.