HACKER Q&A
📣 faizshah

What’s a good solution for messy handwriting recognition for mobile app?


Looking for an API, pretrained model or some guidance on how to implement handwriting recognition of post it notes, handwritten paper notes etc. for a mobile app.


  👤 YossarianFrPrez Accepted Answer ✓
The canonical example of image recognition for AI is recognizing handwritten digits from the NIST dataset; you'll find it in most computer vision tutorials.

If you want to learn about rolling your own: https://towardsdatascience.com/classifying-mnist-digits-usin...

https://machinelearningmastery.com/handwritten-digit-recogni...

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/classification...

The only issue is that you'll have to find training data for letters. I'd be surprised if that didn't exist.

Also, Google has an API for recognizing handwriting: https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/handwriting

I haven't used it, so I can't vouch for it one way or another. But that'd be a pretty easy way to go!


👤 faizshah
I found an interesting solution from caltech: https://github.com/caltechlibrary/handprint

Also it seems the keyword to find models and apis for this is “handwritten text recognition.”