Abstract
Researches on digit recognition have been conducted actively for a long time because the classes to recognize are much fewer than other character sets and because it is very likely thatthe digit recognition can be applied to many problems in real world, The recent studies on designingrecognition system with high performance are in progress with two different aspects. One is toconstruct a recognizer using several features at the same time, and the other is to use severalrecognizers. In this paper, we propose a multistage combination method to recognize the unconstrainedhandwritten numerals. The method is a two-stage combination method which uses multiplecombination methods at the same time unlike the existing methods with only one combination method.The recognizers are first combined by several combination methods of different classes simultaneously,and then the results of them are combined by another combination method to generate a final result.Five recognizers and eight combination methods are used in the proposed system. The experimentalresults showed that the recognition rates on CENPARMI and CEDAR data were 97.75% and 98.6%,respectively and the recognition performance could be improved as the process passed through stages,We could get the best performance by combining the combination methods of different classes, whichmeans there are a complementary relation among them, The proposed method can be considered asan extended version of the existing combination methods.