A database for handwritten yoruba characters

Abstract

This paper describes a novel publicly available dataset for research on offline Yoruba handwritten character recognition. It contains a total of 6954 characters being made up of several categories from a total number of 183 writers thus making it the largest available dataset for Yoruba handwriting research. It can be used for designing and evaluating handwritten character recognition systems for the Yoruba language as well as provide valuable insights through writer identification. The dataset has been partitioned into training and test sets being shared into 70% and 30% respectively.