Bengali Handwritten Character Classification using Transfer Learning on Deep Convolutional Neural Network
This work addresses the problem of recognizing Bengali handwritten characters for applications in digitization and language processing, representing an incremental improvement in a domain-specific task.
The paper tackles Bengali handwritten character recognition by applying transfer learning with ResNet50 and training techniques like a modified One Cycle Policy, achieving 96.12% accuracy in 47 epochs on the BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset.
In this paper, we propose a solution which uses state-of-the-art techniques in Deep Learning to tackle the problem of Bengali Handwritten Character Recognition ( HCR ). Our method uses lesser iterations to train than most other comparable methods. We employ Transfer Learning on ResNet 50, a state-of-the-art deep Convolutional Neural Network Model, pretrained on ImageNet dataset. We also use other techniques like a modified version of One Cycle Policy, varying the input image sizes etc. to ensure that our training occurs fast. We use the BanglaLekha-Isolated Dataset for evaluation of our technique which consists of 84 classes (50 Basic, 10 Numerals and 24 Compound Characters). We are able to achieve 96.12% accuracy in just 47 epochs on BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset. When comparing our method with that of other researchers, considering number of classes and without using Ensemble Learning, the proposed solution achieves state of the art result for Handwritten Bengali Character Recognition. Code and weight files are available at https://github.com/swagato-c/bangla-hwcr-present.