Applying Machine Learning to Recognize Handwritten Characters

Handwritten character recognition is a field of research in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and pattern recognition. A computer performing handwriting recognition is said to be able to acquire and detect characters in paper documents, pictures, touch-screen devices and other sources and convert them into machine-encoded form. Its application is found in optical character recognition, transcription of handwritten documents into digital documents and more advanced intelligent character recognition systems. Handwritten character recognition can be thought of as a subset of the image recognition problem. Basically, the algorithm takes an image (image of a handwritten digit) as an input and outputs the likelihood that the image belongs to different classes (the machine-encoded digits, 1–9).