Pattern matching methods: Based on Area and Based on features
Yes, if applied properly, HOG is a good feature extractor even for OCR. I could point you towards an OpenCV sample and a MATLAB digit classification tutorial which do exactly that. However, if you like to get state-of-the-art performance, I would suggest deep learning methods, more specifically convolutional neural networks. Many works demonstrated the power of these approaches on MNIST dataset. You might like to check this one or this one for some beginner's tutorials.