Recognize a number from an image

Question

I\'m trying to write an application to find the numbers inside an image and add them up.

How can I identify the written number in an image?

Answer 1

Give it up. Really. I as a human can not say for sure if the third letter is a '1' or a '7'. Humans are better in deciphering, so a computer will fail for this. '1' and '7' is only one problematic case, '8' and '6', '3' and '9' are also hard to decipher/distinguish. Your error quote will be >10%. If all the handwriting is from the same person you could try to train an OCR for that, but even in this case you will still have about ~3% errors. It might be that your use case is special, but this number of errors usually prohibits any kind of automated processing. I would look into Mechanical Turk if I really have to automate this.