Deep learning based large scale handwritten Devanagari character recognition

In this paper, we introduce a new public image dataset for Devanagari script: Devanagari Handwritten Character Dataset (DHCD). Our dataset consists of 92 thousand images of 46 different classes of characters of Devanagari script segmented from handwritten documents. We also explore the challenges in recognition of Devanagari characters. Along with the dataset, we also propose a deep learning architecture for recognition of those characters. Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have shown superior results to traditional shallow networks in many recognition tasks. Keeping distance with the regular approach of character recognition by Deep CNN, we focus the use of Dropout and dataset increment approach to improve test accuracy. By implementing these techniques in Deep CNN, we were able to increase test accuracy by nearly 1 percent. The proposed architecture scored highest test accuracy of 98.47% on our dataset.