Two-Stage Feature Generator for Handwritten Digit Classification

In this paper, a novel feature generator framework is proposed for handwritten digit classification. The proposed framework includes a two-stage cascaded feature generator. The first stage is based on principal component analysis (PCA), which generates projected data on principal components as features. The second one is constructed by a partially trained neural network (PTNN), which uses projected data as inputs and generates hidden layer outputs as features. The features obtained from the PCA and PTNN-based feature generator are tested on the MNIST and USPS datasets designed for handwritten digit sets. Minimum distance classifier (MDC) and support vector machine (SVM) methods are exploited as classifiers for the obtained features in association with this framework. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques and achieves accuracies of 99.9815% and 99.9863% on the MNIST and USPS datasets, respectively. The results also show that the proposed framework achieves almost perfect accuracies, even with significantly small training data sizes.