Handwritten Character Recognizer

Inspiration

We talked about the naive bayes algorithm in my CS class and about how it can be used to classify images. I wanted to do something more complicated but I figured it would be easiest to work with something that was just in black and white and would be easy to find large samples for training/testing.

What it does

It was supposed to train a model based on the Naive Bayes algorithm for classifying images (in ascii text format) of handwritten letters (english: A-Z, a-z) and digits (0-9). However, I can't tell if it works on letters because I couldn't find a dataset to use (see challenges) but I have a version of it that works on just numbers.

How I built it

I built it using C++ and CLion

Challenges I ran into

I couldn't find a dataset of handwritten characters that I could use. There were some available but, even with the help of mentors, I couldn't find a way to extract the files that were available into a usable format.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting this to work with numbers!

What's next for Handwritten Character Recognizer

I'm hoping to actually get a dataset of images of characters to work with my project, which might mean adjusting the way my algorithm works (I could possibly create my own). After I get that to work, it would be cool to try and get it to work for recognizing strings of letters and words, not just isolated characters, so I could use it to turn pictures of handwritten words into text, or train it to recognize people's messy handwriting so it could turn it into something readable

Built With

• c++
• clion