A Simple CW-SSIM Kernel-based Nearest Neighbor Method for Handwritten Digit Classification

We propose a simple kernel based nearest neighbor approach for handwritten digit classification. The "distance" here is actually a kernel defining the similarity between two images. We carefully study the effects of different number of neighbors and weight schemes and report the results. With only a few nearest neighbors (or most similar images) to vote, the test set error rate on MNIST database could reach about 1.5%-2.0%, which is very close to many advanced models.