A robust cross-ethnic digital handwriting recognition method based on deep learning

Abstract

With the development of deep learning technology, handwritten character recognition has become the basic hotspot of research. At the same time, the recognition of handwriting in minority languages is gradually worthy of attention. In this paper, a robust and novel improved deep convolutional neural network method is proposed to recognize normal digital handwriting images and minority digital handwritten images (Yi language). To improve the recognition accuracy of handwritten fonts, there are four improvements in our work. Firstly, separable convolution is adopted in the network to cope with the problem of large parameters. Secondly, data augmentation techniques (Gaussian noise, color perturbation, and random rotation) are utilized to improve the expression ability of the dataset and the generalization capabilities of the model. Finally, the shortcut block and the weight initialization are introduced in our network for the problems of network degradation and gradient saturation. Based on deep learning technology, this paper studies the classification and recognition of handwritten digits, and improves the accuracy of the recognition in numbers such as invoices in financial bills. The recognition accuracy of 99.82% has been achieved on MNIST dataset, and 98.79% on the self-building dataset of Yi handwritten digits (YHDD).