Fast recognition of handwritten digits using pairwise coupling support vector machine

In this paper, a hierarchical structure combining a linear classifier based on the Mahalanobis distance and pairwise coupling (PWC) is proposed to effectively tackle multi-class classification problem. By taking the advantage of the distribution information of the dataset, both the recognition rate and speed are all improved. At the same time, the proposed method can estimate the posterior probabilities of a testing pattern more accurately than the classical PWC in multi-class cases. Experimental results on handwritten digit recognition demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.