Improved Model Configuration Strategies for Kannada Handwritten Numeral Recognition

Handwritten numeral recognition has been an important area in the domain of pattern classification. The task becomes even more daunting when working with non-Roman numerals. While convolutional neural networks are the preferred choice for modeling the image data, the conception of techniques to obtain faster convergence and accurate results still poses an enigma to the researchers. In this paper, we present new methods for the initialization and the optimization of the traditional convolutional neural network architecture to obtain better results for Kannada numeral images. Specifically, we propose two different methods- an encoderdecoder setup for unsupervised training and weight initialization, and a particle swarm optimization strategy for choosing the ideal architecture configuration of the CNN. Unsupervised initial training of the architecture helps for a faster convergence owing to more task-suited weights as compared to random initialization while the optimization strategy is helpful to reduce the time required for the manual iterative approach of architecture selection. The proposed setup is trained on varying handwritten Kannada numerals. The proposed approaches are evaluated on two different datasets: a standard Dig-MNIST dataset and a custom-built dataset. Significant improvements across multiple performance metrics are observed in our proposed system over the traditional CNN training setup. The improvement in results makes a strong case for relying on such methods for faster and more accurate training and inference of digit classification, especially when working in the absence of transfer learning.

A Robust Handwritten Numeral Recognition Using Hybrid Orthogonal Polynomials and Moments

Numeral recognition is considered an essential preliminary step for optical character recognition, document understanding, and others. Although several handwritten numeral recognition algorithms have been proposed so far, achieving adequate recognition accuracy and execution time remain challenging to date. In particular, recognition accuracy depends on the features extraction mechanism. As such, a fast and robust numeral recognition method is essential, which meets the desired accuracy by extracting the features efficiently while maintaining fast implementation time. Furthermore, to date most of the existing studies are focused on evaluating their methods based on clean environments, thus limiting understanding of their potential application in more realistic noise environments. Therefore, finding a feasible and accurate handwritten numeral recognition method that is accurate in the more practical noisy environment is crucial. To this end, this paper proposes a new scheme for handwritten numeral recognition using Hybrid orthogonal polynomials. Gradient and smoothed features are extracted using the hybrid orthogonal polynomial. To reduce the complexity of feature extraction, the embedded image kernel technique has been adopted. In addition, support vector machine is used to classify the extracted features for the different numerals. The proposed scheme is evaluated under three different numeral recognition datasets: Roman, Arabic, and Devanagari. We compare the accuracy of the proposed numeral recognition method with the accuracy achieved by the state-of-the-art recognition methods. In addition, we compare the proposed method with the most updated method of a convolutional neural network. The results show that the proposed method achieves almost the highest recognition accuracy in comparison with the existing recognition methods in all the scenarios considered. Importantly, the results demonstrate that the proposed method is robust against the noise distortion and outperforms the convolutional neural network considerably, which signifies the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to the state-of-the-art recognition methods under both clean noise and more realistic noise environments.