Sukhdeep Singh

Vinod Kumar Chauhan, Sukhdeep Singh, Anuj Sharma

Handwritten character recognition (HCR) remains a challenging pattern recognition problem despite decades of research, and lacks research on script independent recognition techniques. {\color{black}This is mainly because of similar character structures, different handwriting styles, diverse scripts, handcrafted feature extraction techniques, unavailability of data and code, and the development of script-specific deep learning techniques. To address these limitations, we have proposed a script independent deep learning network for HCR research, called HCR-Net, that sets a new research direction for the field. HCR-Net is based on a novel transfer learning approach for HCR, which \textit{partly utilizes} feature extraction layers of a pre-trained network.} Due to transfer learning and image augmentation, HCR-Net provides faster and computationally efficient training, better performance and generalizations, and can work with small datasets. HCR-Net is extensively evaluated on 40 publicly available datasets of Bangla, Punjabi, Hindi, English, Swedish, Urdu, Farsi, Tibetan, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi, Nepali and Arabic languages, and established 26 new benchmark results while performed close to the best results in the rest cases. HCR-Net showed performance improvements up to 11\% against the existing results and achieved a fast convergence rate showing up to 99\% of final performance in the very first epoch. HCR-Net significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art transfer learning techniques and also reduced the number of trainable parameters by 34\% as compared with the corresponding pre-trained network. To facilitate reproducibility and further advancements of HCR research, the complete code is publicly released at \url{https://github.com/jmdvinodjmd/HCR-Net}.

Sukhdeep Singh, Sudhir Rohilla, Anuj Sharma

Deep learning expresses a category of machine learning algorithms that have the capability to combine raw inputs into intermediate features layers. These deep learning algorithms have demonstrated great results in different fields. Deep learning has particularly witnessed for a great achievement of human level performance across a number of domains in computer vision and pattern recognition. For the achievement of state-of-the-art performances in diverse domains, the deep learning used different architectures and these architectures used activation functions to perform various computations between hidden and output layers of any architecture. This paper presents a survey on the existing studies of deep learning in handwriting recognition field. Even though the recent progress indicates that the deep learning methods has provided valuable means for speeding up or proving accurate results in handwriting recognition, but following from the extensive literature survey, the present study finds that the deep learning has yet to revolutionize more and has to resolve many of the most pressing challenges in this field, but promising advances have been made on the prior state of the art. Additionally, an inadequate availability of labelled data to train presents problems in this domain. Nevertheless, the present handwriting recognition survey foresees deep learning enabling changes at both bench and bedside with the potential to transform several domains as image processing, speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, robotics and control, medical imaging, medical information processing, bio-informatics, natural language processing, cyber security, and many others.

Sukhdeep Singh, Anuj Sharma, Vinod Kumar Chauhan · oxford

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have emerged as a popular and standard approach for learning from graph-structured data. The literature on GNN highlights the potential of this evolving research area and its widespread adoption in real-life applications. However, most of the approaches are either new in concept or derived from specific techniques. Therefore, the potential of more than one approach in hybrid form has not been studied extensively, which can be well utilized for sequenced data or static data together. We derive a hybrid approach based on two established techniques as generalized aggregation networks and topology adaptive graph convolution networks that solve our purpose to apply on both types of sequenced and static nature of data, effectively. The proposed method applies to both node and graph classification. Our empirical analysis reveals that the results are at par with literature results and better for handwritten strokes as sequenced data, where graph structures have not been explored.

Anuj Sharma, Sukhdeep Singh, S Ratna

The graph neural networks has been proved to be an efficient machine learning technique in real life applications. The handwritten recognition is one of the useful area in real life use where both offline and online handwriting recognition are required. The chain code as feature extraction technique has shown significant results in literature and we have been able to use chain codes with graph neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents first time a novel combination of handwritten trajectories features as chain codes and graph neural networks together. The handwritten trajectories for offline handwritten text has been evaluated using recovery of drawing order, whereas online handwritten trajectories are directly used with chain codes. Our results prove that present combination surpass previous results and minimize error rate in few epochs only.