So I want to be able to recognise patterns in images (such as a number 4), I have been reading about different algorithms and I would really like to use the Nearest Neighbour algorithm, it looks simple and I do understand it based on this tutorial: http://people.revoledu.com/kardi/tutorial/KNN/KNN_Numerical-example.html Problem is, although I understand how to use it to fill in missing data sets, I don't understand how I could use it as a pattern recognition tool to aim in Image Shape Recognition. Could someone please shed some light as to how this algorithm could work for pattern recognition? I have seen tutorials using OpenCV, however I don't really want to use this library as I have the ability to do the pre-processing myself, and it seems silly that I would implement this library just for what should be a simple nearest neighbour algorithm.