Multi-experts for touching digit string recognition

84.6% of touching digit strings have only two digits touching, 12.3% have three digits touching and 3.1% have more than three digits touching. We present a multi-expert approach to recognize touching digit pairs (TDP) and touching digit triples (TDT). We combine holistic and traditional segmentation methods. 25,686 TDP training samples and 2,778 TDP testing samples collected from USPS mail are used in our experiment. The holistic method outperforms the traditional segmentation-based methods. The multi-expert combination has the best performance: a correct recognition rate of 91.1% on TDP.