Handwritten Digit Recognition by Fourier-Packet Descriptors

Any statistical pattern recognition system includes a feature extraction component. For character patterns, several feature families have been tested, such as the Fourier-Wavelet Descriptors. We are proposing here a generalization of this family: the Fourier-Packet Descriptors. We have selected sets of these features and tested them on handwritten digits: the error rate was 1. 55% with a polynomial classifier for a 70 features set and 1. 97% with a discriminative learning quadratic discriminant function for a 40 features set.