Handwritten Digits and Optical Characters Recognition

The process of transcribing a language represented in its spatial form of graphical characters into its symbolic representation is called handwriting recognition. Each script has a collection of characters or letters, often known as symbols, that all share the same fundamental shapes. Handwriting analysis aims to correctly identify input characters or images before being analysed by various automated process systems. Recent research in image processing demonstrates the significance of image content retrieval. Optical character recognition (OCR) systems can extract text from photographs and transform that text to ASCII text. OCR is beneficial and essential in many applications, such as information retrieval systems and digital libraries

A Tale of Two Transcriptions : Machine-Assisted Transcription of Historical Sources

This article is part of the "Norwegian Historical Population Register" project financed by the Norwegian Research Council (grant # 225950) and the Advanced Grand Project "Five Centuries of Marriages"(2011-2016) funded by the European Research Council (# ERC 2010-AdG_20100407)This article explains how two projects implement semi-automated transcription routines: for census sheets in Norway and marriage protocols from Barcelona. The Spanish system was created to transcribe the marriage license books from 1451 to 1905 for the Barcelona area; one of the world's longest series of preserved vital records. Thus, in the Project "Five Centuries of Marriages" (5CofM) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona's Center for Demographic Studies, the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database has been built. More than 600,000 records were transcribed by 150 transcribers working online. The Norwegian material is cross-sectional as it is the 1891 census, recorded on one sheet per person. This format and the underlining of keywords for several variables made it more feasible to semi-automate data entry than when many persons are listed on the same page. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for printed text is scientifically mature, computer vision research is now focused on more difficult problems such as handwriting recognition. In the marriage project, document analysis methods have been proposed to automatically recognize the marriage licenses. Fully automatic recognition is still a challenge, but some promising results have been obtained. In Spain, Norway and elsewhere the source material is available as scanned pictures on the Internet, opening up the possibility for further international cooperation concerning automating the transcription of historic source materials. Like what is being done in projects to digitize printed materials, the optimal solution is likely to be a combination of manual transcription and machine-assisted recognition also for hand-written sources

A study of feature extraction for Arabic calligraphy characters recognition

Optical character recognition (OCR) is one of the widely used pattern recognition systems. However, the research on ancient Arabic writing recognition has suffered from a lack of interest for decades, despite the availability of thousands of historical documents. One of the reasons for this lack of interest is the absence of a standard dataset, which is fundamental for building and evaluating an OCR system. In 2022, we published a database of ancient Arabic words as the only public dataset of characters written in Al-Mojawhar Moroccan calligraphy. Therefore, such a database needs to be studied and evaluated. In this paper, we explored the proposed database and investigated the recognition of Al-Mojawhar Arabic characters. We studied feature extraction by using the most popular descriptors used in Arabic OCR. The studied descriptors were associated with different machine learning classifiers to build recognition models and verify their performance. In order to compare the learned and handcrafted features on the proposed dataset, we proposed a deep convolutional neural network for character recognition. Regarding the complexity of the character shapes, the results obtained were very promising, especially by using the convolutional neural network model, which gave the highest accuracy score

Deep Learning-based Recognition of Devanagari Handwritten Characters

Numerous techniques have been used over many years to study handwriting recognition. There are two methods for reading handwriting, one of which is online and the other offline. Image recognition is the main part of the handwriting recognition process. Image recognition gives careful consideration to the picture's dimensions, viewing angle, and image quality. Machine learning and deep learning techniques are the two areas of focus for developers looking to increase the intelligence of computers. A person may learn to perform a task by repeatedly exercising it until they recall how to do it. His brain's neurons begin to work automatically, enabling him to carry out the task he has quickly learned. This and deep learning are fairly similar. It uses a variety of neural network designs to address a range of problems. The convolution neural network (CNN) is a very effective technique for handwriting and picture detection