DHCR_SmartNet: A smart Devanagari Handwritten Character Recognition using Level-wised CNN Architecture

Abstract

Handwritten Script Recognition is a vital application of Machine Learning domain. Applications like automatic number plate detection, pin code detection and managing historical documents increasing more attention towards handwritten script recognition. English is the most widely spoken language, hence there has been a lot of research into identifying a script using a machine. Devanagari is popular script used by a huge number of people in the Indian Subcontinent. In this paper, level-wised efficient transfer learning approach presented on VGG16 model of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for identification of Devanagari isolated handwritten characters. In this work a new dataset of Devanagari characters is presented and made accessible publicly. Newly created dataset comprises 5800 samples for 12 vowels, 36 consonants and 10 digits. Initially simple CNN is implemented and trained on this new small dataset. In next stage transfer learning approach is implemented on VGG16 model and in last stage fine-tuned efficient VGG16 model is implemented. The training and testing accuracy of fine-tuned model are obtained as 98.16% and 96.47% respectively.