The extended-average common submatrix similarity measure with application to handwritten character images

This paper introduces a new similarity measure derived from the Common Submatrix-based measures for comparing square matrices. The novelty is that the similarity between two matrices is computed as the average area of the largest sub-matrices exactly matching and being located at the same position in the two matrices. By contrast, in the original similarity measures, the largest sub-matrices can exactly or approximately match and be located at different positions. An experiment conducted on a subset of the MNIST and NIST datasets shows that the new similarity measure is very promising in retrieving relevant handwritten character images.