Recognition of off-line kannada handwritten characters by deep learning using capsule network

Abstract

Handwritten character recognition is an important subfield of Computer Vision which has the potential to bridge the gap between humans and machines. Machine learning and Deep learning approaches to the problem have yielded acceptable results throughout, yet there is still room for improvement. off-line Kannada handwritten character recognition is another problem statement in which many authors have shown interest, but the obtained results being acceptable. The initial efforts have used Gabor wavelets and moments functions for the characters. With the introduction of Machine Learning, SVMs and feature vectors have been tried to obtain acceptable accuracies. Deep Belief Networks, ANNs have also been used claiming a con-siderable increase in results. Further advanced techniques such as CNN have been reported to be used to recognize Kannada numerals only. In this work, we budge towards solving the problem statement with Capsule Networks which is now the state of the art technology in the field of Computer Vision. We also carefully consider the drawbacks of CNN and its impact on the problem statement, which are solved with the usage of Capsule Networks. Excellent results have been obtained in terms of accuracies. We take a step further to evaluate the technique in terms of specificity, precision and f1-score. The approach has performed extremely well in terms of these measures also.