Applying multi-layer perceptron and ResNet for handwritten digits recognition

Abstract

The task of handwritten digit recognition is to recognizing the handwritten digits from pictures. Applying machine learning based models to automatically perform handwritten digit recognition task can significantly improve efficiency. This paper applies two machine learning based models, including multi-layer perceptron and residual neural network, for such a task. Firstly, this paper introduces the basic concept of the simple multi-layer perceptron model and then presents the structure of the residual neural network model. Subsequently, such two models are trained on the MNIST corpus, one of the classical dataset for the handwritten digit recognition task. The data pre-processing, like the splitting of training and test set, is described. Also, the processes of testing and training of the two models are presented. According to the experiments on the test set of MNIST, it is observed that the residual neural network can achieve better performance where the accuracy score is 99.240%, while the accuracy score of the multi-layer perceptron model is 97.260%.