Offline English Handwritten Character Recognition using Sequential Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Handwritten Character recognition falls under the domain of image classification that has been under research for years. The idea is to make the machine recognize handwritten human characters. The language focused in this research paper is English while using offline handwritten character recognition for identifying English characters. There are many publically available datasets from which EMNIST is the most challenging one.  The main idea of this research paper is to propose a deep learning CNN method to help recognize English characters. This research paper proposes a deep learning convolutional neural network that is tested and compared with renowned pre-trained models using transfer learning. These parametric settings address multiple issues and are finalized after experimentation. The same hyper-parametric settings were used for all the models under test and E-Character with the same data augmentation settings. The proposed model named the E-Character recognizer was able to produce 87.31% accuracy. It was better than most of the tested pre-trained models and other proposed methods by other researchers. This research paper further highlighted some of the problems like misclassification due to the similar structure of characters.