Modified Convolutional Neural Network of Tamil Character Recognition

Abstract

The handwritten Tamil character recognition in offline mode is challenging tasks as there are virtually different people who have different styles of writing the same characters. Deep convolution neural networks are playing a virtual role nowadays in recognizing handwritten character by automatically learning discriminative features from high dimensionality of input data. This work presents a modified convolution neural network (M-CNN) architecture to achieve a faster convergence rate and also to get the highest recognition accuracy. The M-CNN on different aspects along with layers design, activation function, loss function and optimization is discussed. Systematic experiments on isolated handwritten Tamil character dataset collected from various schools by ourselves. For these collected datasets, the proposed system recognized the characters with 97.07%.