Generate images by composing MNIST digits or EMNIST letters

Purpose

Create training or validation data for machine learning algorithms that involve handwriting, such as OCR.
Some applications involve recognizing not just single digits or letters, but numbers and words. Sometimes a dataset of specifc words or ranges of numbers is needed. This simple script can be used to generate such a dataset.

Usage

To generate clean images of handwritten day/month/year from the MNIST dataset, try

python simulation.py --dir ~/Desktop/mnist --data date --num 10

Example image:

For noisier images, try

python simulation.py --dir ~/Desktop/mnist --speckle_noise --resize --underline_noise --data date --num 10

Example image:

To generate first and last names, try

python simulation.py --dir ~/Desktop/mnist --speckle_noise --resize --underline_noise --spacing 0.7 --data name --num 10

Get an explanation of the command line arguments using

python simulation.py -h