Digit Recognition is an essential element of the process of scanning and converting documents into electronic format. In this work, a new Multiple-Cell Size (MCS) approach is being proposed for utilizing Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classifier for efficient classification of Handwritten Digits. The HOG based technique is sensitive to the cell size selection used in the relevant feature extraction computations. Hence a new MCS approach has been used to perform HOG analysis and compute the HOG features. The system has been tested on the Benchmark MNIST Digit Database of handwritten digits and a classification accuracy of 99.36% has been achieved using an Independent Test set strategy. A Cross-Validation analysis of the classification system has also been performed using the 10-Fold Cross-Validation strategy and a 10-Fold classification accuracy of 99.26% has been obtained. The classification performance of the proposed system is superior to existing techniques using complex procedures since it has achieved at par or better results using simple operations in both the Feature Space and in the Classifier Space. The plots of the system’s Confusion Matrix and the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) show evidence of the superior performance of the proposed new MCS HOG and SVM based digit classification system.
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