Bangla Handwritten Basic Character Recognition Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Bangla is one of the mostly spoken languages all over the world, nonetheless, efforts on Bangla handwritten character recognition is not adequate. The use of Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) based classifiers has become a triumph over the state of art machine learning techniques. Using DCNN model to classify Bangla isolated basic characters can provide better output because of its ability to detect many hidden features from an image. In this paper, a new DCNN model, namely, BBCNet-15 is proposed for Bangla handwritten basic character recognition. the proposed model consists of 6 convolution layers, 6 max pooling layers, 2 fully connected layers followed by the softmax output unit. To avoid overfitting dropout regularization technique is used. The implementation of the proposed DCNN model is evaluated on a benchmark dataset, CMATERdb 3.1.2 which contains 50 character classes including 39 consonants and 11 vowels. The experimental evaluation of BBCNet-15 on the dataset provides a recognition accuracy of 96.40% which outperforms some prominent techniques in existence.