Novel feature extraction technique for the recognition of handwritten digits

This paper presents an efficient handwritten digit recognition system based on support vector machines (SVM). A novel feature set based on transition information in the vertical and horizontal directions of a digit image combined with the famous Freeman chain code is proposed. The main advantage of this feature extraction algorithm is that it does not require any normalization of digits. These features are very simple to implement compared to other methods. We evaluated our scheme on 80,000 handwritten samples of Persian numerals and we have achieved very promising results.