DeepNetDevanagari: a deep learning model for Devanagari ancient character recognition

Devanagari script is the most widely used script in India and other Asian countries. There is a rich collection of ancient Devanagari manuscripts, which is a wealth of knowledge. To make these manuscripts available to people, efforts are being done to digitize these documents. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) plays an important role in recognizing these documents. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a powerful model that is giving very promising results in the field of character recognition, pattern recognition etc. CNN has never been used for the recognition of the Devanagari ancient manuscripts. Our aim in the proposed work is to use the power of CNN for extracting the wealth of knowledge from Devanagari handwritten ancient manuscripts. In addition, we aim is to experiment with various design options like number of layes, stride size, number of filters, kenel size and different functions in various layers and to select the best of these. In this paper, the authors have proposed to use deep learning model as a feature extractor as well as a classifier for the recognition of 33 classes of basic characters of Devanagari ancient manuscripts. A dataset containing 5484 characters has been used for the experimental work. Various experiments show that the accuracy achieved using CNN as a feature extractor is better than other state-of-the-art techniques. The recognition accuracy of 93.73% has been achieved by using the model proposed in this paper for Devanagari ancient character recognition.