Abstract: A system for recognizing handwritten characters, including pre-processing apparatus for generating a set of features for each handwritten character, a neural network disposed for operating on sparse data structures of those features and generating a set of confidence values for each possible character symbol which might correspond to the handwritten character, and post-processing apparatus for adjusting those confidence values and for selecting a character symbol consistent with external knowledge about handwritten characters and the language they are written in. The pre-processing apparatus scales and re-parameterizes the handwritten strokes, encodes the scaled and re-parameterizd strokes into fuzzy membership vectors and binary pointwise data, and combines the vectors and data into a sparse data structure of features.