Handwritten Digit Recognition by Elastic Matching

A simple model of MNIST handwritten digit recognition is presented here. The model is an adaptation of a previous theory of face recognition. It realizes translation and rotation invariance in a principled way instead of being based on extensive learning from large masses of sample data. The presented recognition rates fall short of other publications, but due to its inspectability and conceptual and numerical simplicity, our system commends itself as a basis for further development.