Deep Learning Inspired Nonlinear Classification Methodology for Handwritten Digits Recognition Using DSR Encoder

The overlapped handwritten digit classification is a global challenge and a significant measure to assess the network recognition ability ratio. Most efficient models have been designed based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) for effective image classification and digit identification. Subsequently, multiple CNN models have inadequate accuracy because of high degree parameter dimensions that lead to abnormal digit detection error rates and computation complexity. We propose a Deep Digit Recognition Network (DDRNet) based on Deep ConvNets to minimize the number of parameters and features to keep the model light while maximizing the accuracy with an adaptive voting (AV) scheme for digit recognition. The individual digit is identified by CNN, and uncertain digits or strings are identified by Deep Convolutional Network (DCN) with AV scheme through Voting-Weight Conditional Random Field (VWCRF) strategy. These methods originated with the YOLO algorithm. The simulations show that our DDRNet approach achieves an accuracy of 99.4% without error fluctuations, in a stable state with less than 15 epochs contrast with state-of-art approaches. Additionally, specific convolution techniques (SqueezeNet, batch normalization) and image augmentation techniques (dropout, back-propagation, and an optimum learning rate) were examined to assess the system performance based on MNIST dataset (available at: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/).