Persian Handwritten Digit Recognition Using Combination of Convolutional Neural Network and Support Vector Machine Methods

Persian handwritten digit recognition is one of the important topics of image processing which significantly considered by researchers due to its many applications. The most important challenges in Persian handwritten digit recognition is the existence of various patterns in Persian digit writing that makes the feature extraction step to be more complicated. Since the handcraft feature extraction methods are complicated processes and their performance level are not stable, most of the recent studies have concentrated on proposing a suitable method for automatic feature extraction. In this paper, an automatic method based on machine learning is proposed for high-level feature extraction from Persian digit images by using convolutional neural network (CNN). After that, a non-linear multi-class SVM classifier is used for data classification instead of fully connected layer in final layer of CNN. The proposed method has been applied to HODA dataset and obtained 99.56% of recognition rate. Experimental results are comparable with previous state-of-the-art methods.