[spookie]

To help you out if you're interested:

- a smeared gaussian in one axis and another in another axis can really help segmenting chars, finding lines of text in OCR

- You can unshear chars using the Radon or Hough transform as a basis to understand the angle

Went through MNIST a few weeks ago and I agree it's interesting!

[blackjackfoe]

I am always interested! Thank you for the tips, I'll definitely research these.

[sorenjan]

Shearing is a linear operation that should be trivial for a NN to learn. Have you found that unshearing is actually useful? Was it to feed the image to an existing OCR program?