Stacked auto encoder training incorporating printed text data for handwritten bangla numeral recognition

Abstract

Recognition of handwritten numerals has gained much interest in recent years due to its various application potentials. Bangla is a major language in Indian subcontinent and is the first language of Bangladesh; but unfortunately, study regarding handwritten Bangla numeral recognition (HBNR) is very few with respect to other major languages such as English, Roman etc. Some noteworthy research works have been conducted for recognition of Bangla handwritten numeral using artificial neural network (ANN) as ANN and its various updated models are found to be efficient for classification task. The aim of this study is to develop a better HBNR system and hence investigated deep architecture of stacked auto encoder (SAE) incorporating printed text (SAEPT) method. SAE is a variant of neural networks (NNs) and is applied efficiently for hierarchical feature extraction from its input. The proposed SAEPT contains the encoding of handwritten numeral into printed form in the course of pre-training and finally initializing a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) using these pre-trained weights. Unlike other methods, it does not employ any feature extraction technique. Benchmark dataset with 22000 hand written numerals with different shapes, sizes and variations are used in this study. The proposed method is shown to outperform other prominent existing methods achieving satisfactory recognition accuracy.