Application of Fourier descriptors to the unconstrained handwritten digit recognition
Yi Hui Lu, Steven G. Schlosser, Michael Janeczko · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
This paper presents the results of a comparative study of various Fourier descriptor representations and their use in the recognition of unconstrained handwritten digits. Certain characteristics of five Fourier descriptor representations of handwritten digits are discussed, and illustrations of ambiguous digit classes introduced by use of these Fourier descriptor representations are presented. It is concluded that Fourier descriptors are practically effective only within the framework of an intelligent system capable of reasoning about digit hypotheses. We describe a hypothesis-generating algorithm based on Fourier descriptors which allows the classifier to associate more than one possible digit class with each input. Such hypothesis-generating schemes can be very effective in systems employing multiple classifiers. We compare the performance of the five Fourier descriptor representations based on experiment results produced by the hypothesis-generating classifier for a test set of 14,000 handwritten digits. It is found that some Fourier descriptor formulations are more successful than others for handwritten digit recognition.