Design Of Devanagari Handwritten Character Recognition System Using Various Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Identification of handwritten characters is gradually becoming popular in the field of research due to its many important applications like post card sorting, historical document processing, predicting age and gender of the person, digital signature verification and helping visually impaired peoples. In regard to automation, written characters detection becomes difficult. Its recognition is a deliberating challenging task due to a number of reasons like the shape resemblance of characters, different handwriting styles, different ways of writing the same character, variations in strokes and complexity of compound characters. Writing style is also impacted by the environment around the writer and the mental and physical fitness of writers. newline newline newlineIn this work, we constructed isolated Devanagari handwritten character datasets. These datasets consist of 12 vowels, 36 consonants, newline10 numerals, composite characters and 45 mostly used compound characters. They are created in pen-paper mode first, then scanned and stored as images to their particular class. Different age group writers are considered while taking samples. No restrictions are kept on age group, pen, ink, paper, etc. newline newline newlineWe proposed a novel stage-wised efficient model to recognize Devanagari Handwritten Characters. In the first stage, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is implemented to recognize handwritten Devanagari characters. The model consists of stack of five Convolution2D-BatchNormalization-ReLU-MaxPooling2D layers. The transfer learning methodology is applied in the next stage and the model is trained using the bottleneck characteristics of a pre-trained network of newline newline newline newlineVGG16. Finally, to achieve better performance, the model is fine-tuned on top of the pre-trained network. We achieved promising results with fine-tuned model. Several Convolutional Neural Network models like VGG16, VGG19, ResNet and MobileNet are also explored on our newly created dataset as well as standard datasets. newline newline newlineCapsule Network (CapsNet) is one of the popula