scholarly journals A Survey of Handwritten Character Recognition with MNIST and EMNIST

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (15) ◽  
pp. 3169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Baldominos ◽  
Yago Saez ◽  
Pedro Isasi

This paper summarizes the top state-of-the-art contributions reported on the MNIST dataset for handwritten digit recognition. This dataset has been extensively used to validate novel techniques in computer vision, and in recent years, many authors have explored the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and other deep learning techniques over this dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first exhaustive and updated review of this dataset; there are some online rankings, but they are outdated, and most published papers survey only closely related works, omitting most of the literature. This paper makes a distinction between those works using some kind of data augmentation and works using the original dataset out-of-the-box. Also, works using CNNs are reported separately; as they are becoming the state-of-the-art approach for solving this problem. Nowadays, a significant amount of works have attained a test error rate smaller than 1% on this dataset; which is becoming non-challenging. By mid-2017, a new dataset was introduced: EMNIST, which involves both digits and letters, with a larger amount of data acquired from a database different than MNIST’s. In this paper, EMNIST is explained and some results are surveyed.

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 3344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Savita Ahlawat ◽  
Amit Choudhary ◽  
Anand Nayyar ◽  
Saurabh Singh ◽  
Byungun Yoon

Traditional systems of handwriting recognition have relied on handcrafted features and a large amount of prior knowledge. Training an Optical character recognition (OCR) system based on these prerequisites is a challenging task. Research in the handwriting recognition field is focused around deep learning techniques and has achieved breakthrough performance in the last few years. Still, the rapid growth in the amount of handwritten data and the availability of massive processing power demands improvement in recognition accuracy and deserves further investigation. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are very effective in perceiving the structure of handwritten characters/words in ways that help in automatic extraction of distinct features and make CNN the most suitable approach for solving handwriting recognition problems. Our aim in the proposed work is to explore the various design options like number of layers, stride size, receptive field, kernel size, padding and dilution for CNN-based handwritten digit recognition. In addition, we aim to evaluate various SGD optimization algorithms in improving the performance of handwritten digit recognition. A network’s recognition accuracy increases by incorporating ensemble architecture. Here, our objective is to achieve comparable accuracy by using a pure CNN architecture without ensemble architecture, as ensemble architectures introduce increased computational cost and high testing complexity. Thus, a CNN architecture is proposed in order to achieve accuracy even better than that of ensemble architectures, along with reduced operational complexity and cost. Moreover, we also present an appropriate combination of learning parameters in designing a CNN that leads us to reach a new absolute record in classifying MNIST handwritten digits. We carried out extensive experiments and achieved a recognition accuracy of 99.87% for a MNIST dataset.


Author(s):  
Roopkatha Samanta ◽  
Soulib Ghosh ◽  
Agneet Chatterjee ◽  
Ram Sarkar

Due to the enormous application, handwritten digit recognition (HDR) has become an extremely important domain in optical character recognition (OCR)-related research. The predominant challenges faced in this domain include different photometric inconsistencies together with computational complexity. In this paper, the authors proposed a language invariant shape-based feature descriptor using the refraction property of light rays. It is to be noted that the proposed approach is novel as an adaptation of refraction property is completely new in this domain. The proposed method is assessed using five datasets of five different languages. Among the five datasets, four are offline (written Devanagari, Bangla, Arabic, and Telugu) and one is online (written in Assamese) handwritten digit datasets. The approach provides admirable outcomes for online digits whereas; it yields satisfactory results for offline handwritten digits. The method gives good result for both online and offline handwritten digits, which proves its robustness. It is also computationally less expensive compared to other state-of-the-art methods including deep learning-based models.


2020 ◽  
Vol 224 ◽  
pp. 01025
Author(s):  
Alexey Beskopylny ◽  
Alexandr Lyapin ◽  
Nikita Beskopylny ◽  
Elena Kadomtseva

The article is devoted to the problem of comparing the effectiveness of feedforward (FF) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) algorithms in the problems of handwritten digit recognition and classification. In recent years, the attention of many researchers to the FF and CNN algorithms has given rise to many hybrid models focused on solving specific problems. At the same time, the efficiency of each algorithm in terms of accuracy and labour intensity remains unclear. It is shown that in classical problems, FFs can have advantages over CNN in terms of labour intensity with the same accuracy of results. Using the handwritten digits data from the MNIST database as an example, it is shown that FF algorithms provide greater accuracy and require less computation time than CNN.


Author(s):  
Owais Mujtaba Khandy ◽  
Samad Dadvandipour

<p><span>This paper covers the work done in handwritten digit recognition and the various classifiers that have been developed. Methods like MLP, SVM, Bayesian networks, and Random forests were discussed with their accuracy and are empirically evaluated. Boosted LetNet 4, an ensemble of various classifiers, has shown maximum efficiency among these methods. </span></p>


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