Abstract
This paper presents the results of a comparative study of various Fourier descriptor representations and their use in recognition of unconstrained handwritten digits. Certain characteristics of five distinct 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 hypothesisgenerating algorithm based on Fourier descriptors which allows a classifier to associate more than one 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 a particular hypothesis-generating classifier for a test set of 14000 handwritten digits. It is found that some Fourier descriptor formulations are more successful than others for handwritten digit recognition.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arbter K, Snyder W (1990) Application of Affine-Invariant Fourier Descriptors to Recognition of 3-D Objects. IEEE Trans on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 12(7):640–647
Ahmed P, Suen CY (1980) Computer Recognition of Totally Unconstrained Handwritten ZIP Codes. International Joint Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Inteligence, pp 1–15
Ballard D, Brown C (1982) Computer Vision. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
Casey RG (1970) Moment Normalization of Handprinted Characters. IBM Journal of Research and Development 14(5):548–557
Crimmins T (1982) A Complete Set of Fourier Descriptors for TwoDimensional Shapes. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 2(6):848–855
Duran BS, Odell P (1974) Cluster Analysis. Springer-Verlag, New York
Fu KS (1980) Recent Developments in Pattern Recognition. IEEE Transactions on Computers 29(10):845–854
Gader P, Forester B, Ganzberger M (1991) Recognition of Handwritten Digits Using Template and Model Matching. Pattern Recognition 24(5):421–432
Ghorbel F, Cazuguel G, Tocnaye JLB (1988) Similarity-Invariant Analysis of Handwritten ZIP Codes Using Fourier Descriptors. International Journal of Reserach & Engineering in Postal Applications 1(1): 1–5
Gonzalez C, Wintz P (1987) Digital Image Processing. Second Edition, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA
Granlund GH (1972) Fourier Preprocessing for Hand-Print Character Recognition. IEEE Transactions on Computers 21(2): 195–201
Impedovo S, Marangelli B, Fanelli A (1978) A Fourier Descriptor Set for Recognizing Nonstylized Numerals. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetic 8(8):640–645
Lai M, Suen C (1981) Automatic Recognition of Characters by Fourier Descriptors and Boundary Line Encodings. Pattern Recognition 14(6):383–393
Le Cun Y, Boser B, Denker JS (1989) Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition. Neural Computation 1(4):541–551
Lin CC, Chellappa R (1987) Classification of Partial 2-D Shapes Using Fourier Descriptors. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 9(5):686–690
Mitchell B, Gillies A (1989) A Model-Based Computer Vision System for Recognizing Handwritten ZIP Codes. Machine Vision and Applications 2(4):231–243
Persoon E, Fu KS (1977) Shape Discrimination Using Fourier Descriptors. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 7(3): 170–179
Rosenfeld A, Kak A (1976) Digital Picture Processing. Academic Press, New York
Shridhar M, Badreldin A (1984) High-Accuracy Character Recognition Algorithm Using Fourier and Topological Descriptors. Pattern Recognition 17(5):515–524
Schlosser S, Trenkle J, Vogt R (1991) Morphological Feature Set Optimization Using the Genetic Algorithm. In: SPIE Image Algebra and Morphological Image Processing II, San Diego, CA
Wasserman PD (1989) Neural Computing: Theory and Practice. Van Nostrand-Reinhold, New York
Zahn C, Roskies R (1972) Fourier Descriptors for Plane Closed Curves. IEEE Transactions on Computers 21(3):269–281
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lu, Y., Schlosser, S. & Janeczko, M. Fourier descriptors and handwritten digit recognition. Machine Vis. Apps. 6, 25–34 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01212429
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01212429