Reconhecimento de dígitos manuscritos: busca de um classificador com máxima taxa de acerto

Abstract

Optical character recognition system, aka OCR, allows identifying and recognizing printed characters from pictures. A wide range of devices already has such functionality, e.g, scanners and mobile devices. The current everyday tasks has an increasing demand for handwritten character recognition, for example, recognize specified amount on bank checks, identify postal address to automate some aspects of letter delivery. Handwritten digit recognition faces the difficulty of great intraclass variability, due to different writing stiles and different character slant degrees. This work presents three strategies to address handwritten digit recognition by means of three pattern recognition methods and two feature extraction algorithms. The first strategy makes use of Fourier Descriptor and Boundary Transition Technique to extract representative values from digits contours in order to recognize digits is used a neural network Multilayer Perceptron and a set of Support Vector Machines classifiers to validate neural network output. The second strategy represents this work's baseline using the classic convolutional neural networks algorithm from literature, LeNet5. Such algorithm received as input the raw digit images without preprocessing. The third strategy used a unbalanced decision tree in which support vector machines actuated as decision points and as representative feature received the raw digit images. Late experiments showed that first strategy was not effective enough to recognize digits; only about 80% of characters were successfully recognized. By means of Convolutional Neural Network was possible to achieve 0.9% of error rate, not so impressive if compared to literature best results. The third strategy was capable to recognize 100% of test samples from handwritten digits dataset of MNist. Each support vector machine classifier achieved 0% of error rate, due to an enormous amount of support vectors.