Because some of the letters are connected, and the letter formation is poor and variable, you're going to have to look at handwriting analysis papers. Go here and look for papers on it: http://www.visionbib.com/bibliography/contentschar.html#OCR,%20Document%20Analysis%20and%20Character%20Recognition%20Systems Nothing built in to MATLAB will handle letters that sloppy right out of the box.
23.4.6 Roman Alphabet
23.4.6.1 Roman Alphabet -- Machine Printed
23.4.6.2 Handwritten Characters, Roman, Latin Alphabet
23.4.6.2.1 Handwritten Characters, Feature Extraction
23.4.6.2.2 Online Recognition of Handwritten Characters
23.4.6.2.3 Handwritten Characters, Cursive Script, Surveys, Data, Comparisons, Evaluations
23.4.6.3 Handwriting, Cursive Script Recognition Systems
23.4.6.3.1 Cursive Script, Word Level Recognition, Word Spotting, Language Model
23.4.6.3.2 Cursive Script, Text Line Segmentation, Script Line, Segmentation, Text Line Extraction
23.4.6.3.3 On-Line Cursive Script Recognition Systems
