Handwriting Recognition with Deep Learning

In this post, we will go over an example to apply deep learning, in particular convolutional neural network, to recognize handwritten numbers from 0 to 9 using TensorFlow backend Keras. If you don't have deep learning environment setup yet, checkout this post.

Thankfully, there is publicly available handwritten digits and its labels on the web that we can use. For more info, check out MNIST website. Even better, Keras has MNIST data module, so we will use  it.

Use your favorite editor and create mnist.py file with the following:

Upon running the file with
$ python mnist.py

you will see convolutional network being trained with data and tested with unseen data with accuracy of about 99%!