Special Database 19 contains NIST's entire corpus of training materials for handprinted document and character recognition. It publishes Handprinted Sample Forms from 3600 writers, 810,000 character images isolated from their forms, ground truth classifications for those images, reference forms for further data collection, and software utilities for image management and handling.

The features of this database are:

• Final accumulation of NIST's handprinted sample data

• Full page HSF forms from 3600 writers

• Separate digit, upper and lower case, and free text fields

• Over 800,000 images with hand checked classifications

  
  The database is NIST's largest and probably final release of images intended for handprint document processing and OCR research. The full page images are the default input to the NIST FORM-BASED HANDPRINT RECOGNITION SYSTEM, a public domain release of end-to-end recognition software.