Classification of Distorted Handwritten Digits by Swarming an Affine Transform Space

Given an affine transform image having a distorted appearance, if a transform function is known, then an inverse transform function can be applied to the image to produce the undistorted original image. However, if the transform function is not known, can we estimate its values by searching through this large affine transform space? Here, an unknown affine transform function of a given digit is estimated by searching through the affine transform space using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach. In this paper, we present important concepts of the proposed approach, describe the experimental design and discuss our results which favorably support the potential of the approach. We successfully demonstrate the potential of this novel approach that could be used to classify a large set of unseen distorted affine transform digits with only a small set of digit prototypes.