Handwritten Digit Recognition

Abstract

Handwritten digit recognition is the intelligence of computers to recognize digits written by humans. But it becomes one of the most challenging tasks for machines as handwritten digits are not perfect and can be made with many different: flavors, size, thickness. Thus, as a solution to this problem, Handwriting digit recognition model comes into picture. Many machine learning techniques have been employed to solve the handwritten digit recognition problem. This paper focuses on Neural Network (NN) approaches. Among the three famous NN approaches: deep neural network (DNN), deep belief network (DBN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), the specialization of CNN as compared to other NN of being able to detect pattern is what makes it so useful for recognizing handwritten digits. Humans can very easily see, read & write any handwritten digits, when written in proper format. Even if the digits are not written in proper format we can use our logic and predict what digit it could be. But It is a hard task for the machine to recognize handwritten digits as these are not perfect and can be made with many different flavors. Thus handwritten digit recognition is the solution to this problem which uses the image of a digit and recognizes the digit present in the image. The handwritten digit recognition is the ability of computers to recognize human handwritten digits. The goal is to build a model that can efficiently and reliably recognize the digits and output the proper result. Amongst all the other neural networks, working and implementing a model using Convolution Neural Network gives out the most precise results. It is most popularly used for analyzing images as well as for other data analysis or classification problems. CNN has hidden layers called convolutional layers. These layers work the same way as other layers do but here we need to specify the no of filters each layer should have These filters are actually what detects the pattern. Patterns could be edges, corners, circles or any complex other objects like eyes, ears or even deeper full dogs, cats, etc. Thus, the specialization of CNN as compared to other NN of being able to detect patterns is what makes it so useful for recognizing handwritten digits Key Word: Neural Networks; Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN); Image Processing; Optical Character Recognition (OCR); MNIST Dataset