Eighth International Conference on Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR 2016)

DEEP LEARNING APPROACH FOR RECOGNITION OF HAND-WRITTEN KANNADA NUMERALS

We come across a large volume of handwritten texts in our daily lives and hand-written character recognition has long been an important area of research in pattern recognition. The complexity of the task varies among different languages and it so happens largely due to the similarity between characters, distinct shapes and the number of characters which are all language-specific properties. There have been numerous works on character recognition of English alphabets and with laudable success, but regional languages have not been dealt with very frequently and with similar accuracies. In this paper, we explored the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks and Deep Belief Networks in the classification of Handwritten Kannada numerals and conclusively compared the results obtained. The proposed method has shown satisfactory recognition accuracy in light of difficulties faced with regional languages such as the similarity between characters and minute nuances that differentiate them. We can further extend this to all the Kannada characters.