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Comment by ItendToDisagree | Hacker News Reader

This looks cool but I wish it showed examples of different kinds of handwriting being detected.

Cursive?

European numbers vs American numbers (the 1 especially)?

Doctor (or other badly rendered hand writing)?

Seems like this technology isn't really all that useful if it doesn't work on various inputs, especially 'unclean' or 'sloppy' inputs.

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Thanks for the comment!

The algorithm works on a large variety of handwriting (currently only support English).

It's a NN that was trained on ~100k different handwriting examples, and it's pretty robust to cursive / sloppy handwriting. Haven't tried European vs American numbers yet but I'll definitely give it a try now that you've piqued my curiosity

Thanks for the reply! The European 1 often looks like an upward facing triangle without a bottom line. Surprisingly frequently it has caused European's in the US to have issues with the IRS/Taxes because the European 1 is often interpreted by Americans as a 7 (because Americans do not use a bar across the center of the 7 or Z). A household size of 7 instead of 1 can be a real back breaker!

Pretty cool project / release! How does it do with bubbly teenage girl script? Example: http://www.annakoren.com/images/love7.gif Best to ya.

thanks for the question!

It handles that kind of script pretty well, mainly because we had a good amount of training examples from college student handwriting

>European numbers vs American numbers (the 1 especially)?

Honestly I think 9 will be the bigger issue, to my eyes the European version is near identical to lower-case G.

You mean q? Because g has that loop at the end.

Both, really. Check out this small sample from MNIST

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amaury_Lendasse/publica...

No, I mean G precisely because it has that loop at the bottom. I see it near universally in Poland, and 100% in Germany but with a terribly small sample size.

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