(Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-691)

In this paper we evaluate the classification accuracy of four

statistical and three neural network classifiers for two image based pattern classification problems. These are fingerprint classification and optical character recognition (OCR) for isolated handprinted digits. The evaluation results reported here should be useful for designers of practical systems for these two important commercial applications. For the OCR problem, the Karhunen-Loeve (K-L) transform of the images is used to generate the inp ut feature set. Similarly for the fingerprint problem, the K-L transform of the ridge directions is used to generate the input feature set. The statistical classifiers used were Euclidean minimum distance, quadratic minimum distance, normal, and knearest neighbor. The neural network classifiers used were multilayer perceptron, radial basis function, and probabilistic. The OCR data consisted of 7,480 digit images for training and 23,140 digit images for testing. The fingerprint data consisted of 9,000 trai ning and 2,000 testing images. In addition to evaluation for accuracy, the multilayer perceptron and radial basis function networks were evaluated for size and generalization capability. For the evaluated datasets the best accuracy obtained for either pro blem was provided by the probabilistic neural network, where the minimum classification error was 2.5% for OCR and 7.2% for fingerprints.