Semeion (Semeion Handwritten Digit Data Set)

1593 handwritten digits from around 80 persons were scanned, stretched in a rectangular box 16x16 in a gray scale of 256 values.

The dataset was created by Tactile Srl, Brescia, Italy (http://www.tattile.it) and donated in 1994 to Semeion Research Center of Sciences of Communication, Rome, Italy (http://www.semeion.it), for machine learning research.

For any questions, e-mail Massimo Buscema (m.buscema '@' semeion.it) or Stefano Terzi (s.terzi '@' semeion.it)

Data Set Information:

1593 handwritten digits from around 80 persons were scanned, stretched in a rectangular box 16x16 in a gray scale of 256 values. Then each pixel of each image was scaled into a boolean (1/0) value using a fixed threshold.

Each person wrote on a paper all the digits from 0 to 9, twice. The commitment was to write the digit the first time in the normal way (trying to write each digit accurately) and the second time in a fast way (with no accuracy).

The best validation protocol for this dataset seems to be a 5x2CV, 50% Tune (Train +Test), and completely blind 50% Validation

Attribute Information:

This dataset consists of 1593 records (rows) and 256 attributes (columns). Each record represents a handwritten digit, originally scanned with a resolution of 256 grays scale (28). Each pixel of each original scanned image was first stretched, and after scaled between 0 and 1 (setting to 0 for every pixel whose value was under the value 127 of the grey scale (127 included) and setting to 1 for each pixel whose original value in the grey scale was over 127).

Finally, each binary image was scaled again into a 16x16 square box (the final 256 binary attributes).