Handwritten Gurmukhi Digit Recognition System for Small Datasets

In the present study, a method to increase the recognition accuracy of Gurmukhi (Indian Regional Script) Handwritten Digits has been proposed. The proposed methodology uses a DCNN (Deep Convolutional Neural Network) with a cascaded XGBoost (Extreme Gradient Boosting) algorithm. Also, a comprehensive analysis has been done to apprehend the impact of kernel size of DCNN on recognition accuracy. The reason for using DCNN is its impressive performance in terms of recognition accuracy of handwritten digits, but in order to achieve good recognition accuracy, DCNN requires a huge amount of data and also significant training/testing time. In order to increase the accuracy of DCNN for a small dataset more images have been generated by applying a shear transformation (A transformation that preserves parallelism but not length and angles) to the original images. To address the issue of large training time only two hidden layers along with selective cascading XGBoost among the misclassified digits have been used. Also, the issue of overfitting is discussed in detail and has been reduced to a great extent. Finally, the results are compared with performance of some recent techniques like SVM (Support Vector Machine) Random Forest, and XGBoost classifiers on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) features obtained on the same dataset. It is found that proposed methodology can outperform other techniques in terms of overall rate of recognition.