Comparative Performance Evaluation of VGG-16 and Capsnet using Kannada MNIST

Abstract

Abstract: Handwriting recognition is an important problem in character recognition. It is much more difficult especially for regional languages such as Kannada. In this regard there has been a recent surge of interest in designing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for this problem. However, CNNs typically require large amounts of training data and cannot handle input transformations. Capsule networks, which is referred to as capsNets proposed recently to overcome these shortcomings and posed to revolutionize deep learning solutions. Our particular interest in this work is to recognize kannada digit characters, and making capsnet robust to rotation and transformation. In this paper, we focus to achieve the following objectives :1. Explore whether or not capsnet is capable of providing a better fit for the digit images; 2. Adapt and incorporate capsNets for the problem of kannada MNIST digit classification problem at hand; 3. develop a real time application to take handwritten input from the user and recognize the digit; 4. Compare the capsnet with other models on various parameters. Keywords: Capsule Networks, Deep Learning, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Kannada MNIST, VGG-16