Handwritten Devanagari Character Recognition Using Layer-Wise Training of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Adaptive Gradient Methods

Handwritten character recognition is currently getting the attention of researchers because of possible applications in assisting technology for blind and visually impaired users, human-robot interaction, automatic data entry for business documents, etc. In this work, we propose a technique to recognize handwritten Devanagari characters using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) which are one of the recent techniques adopted from the deep learning community. We experimented the ISIDCHAR database provided by (Information Sharing Index) ISI, Kolkata and V2DMDCHAR database with six different architectures of DCNN to evaluate the performance and also investigate the use of six recently developed adaptive gradient methods. A layer-wise technique of DCNN has been employed that helped to achieve the highest recognition accuracy and also get a faster convergence rate. The results of layer-wise-trained DCNN are favorable in comparison with those achieved by a shallow technique of handcrafted features and standard DCNN.