Handwritten numbers and characters recognition

Dears,

I'm trying to recognize handwritten characters and numbers using MATLAB, but I'm struggeling in identifying the dataset that includes both numbers and characeters. I know prprob function uses to identify the characters but I dont know how to identify the numbers to an equal data set.

I know the basics and I wrote the following:

I = imread('Test.jpeg');
imshow(I)
Igray=rgb2gray(I);
imshow(Igray)
Ibw = im2bw(Igray,graythresh(Igray)); 
imshow(Ibw)
Iedge = edge(uint8(Ibw)); 
imshow(Iedge)
se = strel('square',2); 
Iedge2 = imdilate(Iedge, se); 
imshow(Iedge2);
Ifill= imfill(Iedge2,'holes'); 
imshow(Ifill)

[Ilabel, num] = bwlabel(Ifill);
disp(num);
Iprops = regionprops(Ilabel);
Ibox = [Iprops.BoundingBox];
Ibox = reshape(Ibox,[4 24]);
hold on;

any ideas on how to build and train the network?

[Cris LaPierre]

Have you seen this demo? Handwriting Recognition Using Bagged Classification Trees

You may also consider looking at this file exchange submission: Handwritten Text Recognition

[Mo'ath Al-Hayek]

Thanks Cris for your answer, yeah I already checked these, I want to do it using backpropagation. any ideas?

[Mo'ath Al-Hayek]

@Greg Heath please advise

[Mo'ath Al-Hayek]

@Cris LaPierre

I understand this file really well but I dont know how to train the network for both letters and numbers so that it can fully function https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/48494-character-recognition-using-neural-networks

[Walter Roberson]

@Mo'ath Al-Hayek

Please note that @Greg Heath seldom volunteers anymore. It might be some time before he notices your mention of him.

[Mo'ath Al-Hayek]

@Walter Roberson

Thanks a lot for your note, any ideas on how to get a dataset for both numbers and letters together? I want to train a network on both numbers and letters then simplify that dataset into lets say 7*5 matrix or something similiar. Is that possible?