Deep Learning Networks for Handwritten Bangla Character Recognition

In recent years, deep convolutional networks (DCNN) have gained popularity for different classification (or recognition) tasks. In this paper, three well known DCNN structures were used, i.e., AlexNet, SqueezeNet and GoogLeNet, and their classification performances in recognizing handwritten Bangla isolated characters were compared. These networks have simpler structures compared to the recent DCNNs. Experiments on a standard Bangla database revealed that the overall performance of GoogLeNet is slightly better than the other two networks. Further analysis using saliency maps of the test samples revealed the important features that are learned by the networks for classifying characters. This information led us to understand why classification of some samples fail and how to rectify these. © (2023), (International Association of Engineers). All Rights Reserved.