Comparative study of part-based handwritten character recognition methods

The purpose of this paper is to introduce three part-based methods for handwritten character recognition and then compare their performances experimentally. All of those methods decompose handwritten characters into "parts". Then some recognition processes are done in a part-wise manner and, finally, the recognition results at all the parts are combined via voting to have the recognition result of the entire character. Since part-based methods do not rely on the global structure of the character, we can expect their robustness against various deformations. Three voting methods have been investigated for the combination: single voting, multiple voting, and class distance. All of them use different strategies for voting. Experimental results on the MNIST database showed the relative superiority of the class distance method and the robustness of the multiple voting method against the reduction of training set.