A Comparative Study on Handwriting Digit Recognition Using Neural Networks

The handwritten digit recognition problem becomes one of the most famous problems in machine learning and computer vision applications. Many machine learning techniques have been employed to solve the handwritten digit recognition problem. This paper focuses on Neural Network (NN) approaches. The most three famous NN approaches are deep neural network (DNN), deep belief network (DBN) and convolutional neural network (CNN). In this paper, the three NN approaches are compared and evaluated in terms of many factors such as accuracy and performance. Recognition accuracy rate and performance, however, is not the only criterion in the evaluation process, but there are interesting criteria such as execution time. Random and standard dataset of handwritten digit have been used for conducting the experiments. The results show that among the three NN approaches, DNN is the most accurate algorithm; it has 98.08% accuracy rate. However, the execution time of DNN is comparable with the other two algorithms. On the other hand, each algorithm has an error rate of 1-2% because of the similarity in digit shapes, specially, with the digits (1,7), (3,5), (3,8), (8,5) and (6,9).