Alpha*-Approximated Delaunay Triangulation Based Descriptors for Handwritten Character Recognition

This paper presents an original feature vector extraction process based on the Delaunay triangulation (DT) and a zoning technique. The presented work provides an illustration of the equivalency between a zoning and the Delaunay triangulation in the context of handwritten character recognition. A novel technique that relies on the approximation of a DT and an automatic pruning calculation is introduced. We call this technique the alpha-approximation. To discuss our contribution, experiments are conducted on the MNIST database of handwritten digits using a support vector machine classifier for the classification task.