Dzongkha Handwritten Digit Recognition using Machine Learning Techniques

Abstract

Handwritten digit recognition has recently gained importance, attracting many researchers due to its use in various machine learning and computer vision applications. As technology and science progressing, there is a need for a system to recognize the handwritten script in several real-time applications to reduce human effort. There a lot of work has been done on the recognition and generation of handwritten digits of high-resource languages such as English. However, insufficient work has been done on Dzongkha digits recognition, as Dzongkha digits are low-resource and more complex than English patterns. This paper aims to perform handwritten character recognition of Dzongkha digit using several machine learning techniques. The unavailability of the Dzongkha handwritten digit dataset is the prime motivation behind this work. To facilitates the recognition of Dzongkha handwritten digit, we have collected the data of Dzongkha handwritten digit from indigenous and non-indigenous people of Bhutan and provided the dataset for further research. Moreover, we have used several machine algorithms, including a support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor, and decision tree. Among these algorithms, the support vector machine classification algorithm has achieved a remarkable result with an accuracy of 98.29%.