Toward high-performance online HCCR: a CNN approach with DropDistortion, path signature and spatial stochastic max-pooling

This paper presents an investigation of several techniques that increase the accuracy of online handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR). We propose a new training strategy named DropDistortion to train a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with distorted samples. DropDistortion gradually lowers the degree of character distortion during training, which allows the DCNN to better generalize. Path signature is used to extract effective features for online characters. Further improvement is achieved by employing spatial stochastic max-pooling as a method of feature map distortion and model averaging. Experiments were carried out on three publicly available datasets, namely CASIA-OLHWDB 1.0, CASIA-OLHWDB 1.1, and the ICDAR2013 online HCCR competition dataset. The proposed techniques yield state-of-the-art recognition accuracies of 97.67%, 97.30%, and 97.99%, respectively.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Handwritten Bangla Character Recognition Using The State-of-Art Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

In spite of advances in object recognition technology, Handwritten Bangla Character Recognition (HBCR) remains largely unsolved due to the presence of many ambiguous handwritten characters and excessively cursive Bangla handwritings. Even the best existing recognizers do not lead to satisfactory performance for practical applications related to Bangla character recognition and have much lower performance than those developed for English alpha-numeric characters. To improve the performance of HBCR, we herein present the application of the state-of-the-art Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) including VGG Network, All Convolution Network (All-Conv Net), Network in Network (NiN), Residual Network, FractalNet, and DenseNet for HBCR. The deep learning approaches have the advantage of extracting and using feature information, improving the recognition of 2D shapes with a high degree of invariance to translation, scaling and other distortions. We systematically evaluated the performance of DCNN models on publicly available Bangla handwritten character dataset called CMATERdb and achieved the superior recognition accuracy when using DCNN models. This improvement would help in building an automatic HBCR system for practical applications.Comment: 12 pages,22 figures, 5 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1705.0268

MatriVasha: A Multipurpose Comprehensive Database for Bangla Handwritten Compound Characters

At present, recognition of the Bangla handwriting compound character has been an essential issue for many years. In recent years there have been application-based researches in machine learning, and deep learning, which is gained interest, and most notably is handwriting recognition because it has a tremendous application such as Bangla OCR. MatrriVasha, the project which can recognize Bangla, handwritten several compound characters. Currently, compound character recognition is an important topic due to its variant application, and helps to create old forms, and information digitization with reliability. But unfortunately, there is a lack of a comprehensive dataset that can categorize all types of Bangla compound characters. MatrriVasha is an attempt to align compound character, and it's challenging because each person has a unique style of writing shapes. After all, MatrriVasha has proposed a dataset that intends to recognize Bangla 120(one hundred twenty) compound characters that consist of 2552(two thousand five hundred fifty-two) isolated handwritten characters written unique writers which were collected from within Bangladesh. This dataset faced problems in terms of the district, age, and gender-based written related research because the samples were collected that includes a verity of the district, age group, and the equal number of males, and females. As of now, our proposed dataset is so far the most extensive dataset for Bangla compound characters. It is intended to frame the acknowledgment technique for handwritten Bangla compound character. In the future, this dataset will be made publicly available to help to widen the research.Comment: 19 fig, 2 tabl

Learning to Write Stylized Chinese Characters by Reading a Handful of Examples

Automatically writing stylized Chinese characters is an attractive yet challenging task due to its wide applicabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Style-Aware Variational Auto-Encoder (SA-VAE) to flexibly generate Chinese characters. Specifically, we propose to capture the different characteristics of a Chinese character by disentangling the latent features into content-related and style-related components. Considering of the complex shapes and structures, we incorporate the structure information as prior knowledge into our framework to guide the generation. Our framework shows a powerful one-shot/low-shot generalization ability by inferring the style component given a character with unseen style. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to learn to write new-style Chinese characters by observing only one or a few examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in generating different stylized Chinese characters by fusing the feature vectors corresponding to different contents and styles, which is of significant importance in real-world applications.Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 201

A Study of Sindhi Related and Arabic Script Adapted languages Recognition

A large number of publications are available for the Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Significant researches, as well as articles are present for the Latin, Chinese and Japanese scripts. Arabic script is also one of mature script from OCR perspective. The adaptive languages which share Arabic script or its extended characters; still lacking the OCRs for their language. In this paper we present the efforts of researchers on Arabic and its related and adapted languages. This survey is organized in different sections, in which introduction is followed by properties of Sindhi Language. OCR process techniques and methods used by various researchers are presented. The last section is dedicated for future work and conclusion is also discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 8 Figures, Sindh Univ. Res. Jour. (Sci. Ser.

Handwritten Bangla Digit Recognition Using Deep Learning

In spite of the advances in pattern recognition technology, Handwritten Bangla Character Recognition (HBCR) (such as alpha-numeric and special characters) remains largely unsolved due to the presence of many perplexing characters and excessive cursive in Bangla handwriting. Even the best existing recognizers do not lead to satisfactory performance for practical applications. To improve the performance of Handwritten Bangla Digit Recognition (HBDR), we herein present a new approach based on deep neural networks which have recently shown excellent performance in many pattern recognition and machine learning applications, but has not been throughly attempted for HBDR. We introduce Bangla digit recognition techniques based on Deep Belief Network (DBN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), CNN with dropout, CNN with dropout and Gaussian filters, and CNN with dropout and Gabor filters. These networks have the advantage of extracting and using feature information, improving the recognition of two dimensional shapes with a high degree of invariance to translation, scaling and other pattern distortions. We systematically evaluated the performance of our method on publicly available Bangla numeral image database named CMATERdb 3.1.1. From experiments, we achieved 98.78% recognition rate using the proposed method: CNN with Gabor features and dropout, which outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms for HDBR.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3

Handwritten Isolated Bangla Compound Character Recognition: a new benchmark using a novel deep learning approach

In this work, a novel deep learning technique for the recognition of handwritten Bangla isolated compound character is presented and a new benchmark of recognition accuracy on the CMATERdb 3.1.3.3 dataset is reported. Greedy layer wise training of Deep Neural Network has helped to make significant strides in various pattern recognition problems. We employ layerwise training to Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) in a supervised fashion and augment the training process with the RMSProp algorithm to achieve faster convergence. We compare results with those obtained from standard shallow learning methods with predefined features, as well as standard DCNNs. Supervised layerwise trained DCNNs are found to outperform standard shallow learning models such as Support Vector Machines as well as regular DCNNs of similar architecture by achieving error rate of 9.67% thereby setting a new benchmark on the CMATERdb 3.1.3.3 with recognition accuracy of 90.33%, representing an improvement of nearly 10%

Coverless Information Hiding Based on Generative adversarial networks

Traditional image steganography modifies the content of the image more or less, it is hard to resist the detection of image steganalysis tools. To address this problem, a novel method named generative coverless information hiding method based on generative adversarial networks is proposed in this paper. The main idea of the method is that the class label of generative adversarial networks is replaced with the secret information as a driver to generate hidden image directly, and then extract the secret information from the hidden image through the discriminator. It's the first time that the coverless information hiding is achieved by generative adversarial networks. Compared with the traditional image steganography, this method does not modify the content of the original image. therefore, this method can resist image steganalysis tools effectively. In terms of steganographic capacity, anti-steganalysis, safety and reliability, the experimen shows that this hidden algorithm performs well.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1703.05502 by other author

A Novel Transfer Learning Approach upon Hindi, Arabic, and Bangla Numerals using Convolutional Neural Networks

Increased accuracy in predictive models for handwritten character recognition will open up new frontiers for optical character recognition. Major drawbacks of predictive machine learning models are headed by the elongated training time taken by some models, and the requirement that training and test data be in the same feature space and consist of the same distribution. In this study, these obstacles are minimized by presenting a model for transferring knowledge from one task to another. This model is presented for the recognition of handwritten numerals in Indic languages. The model utilizes convolutional neural networks with backpropagation for error reduction and dropout for data overfitting. The output performance of the proposed neural network is shown to have closely matched other state-of-the-art methods using only a fraction of time used by the state-of-the-arts.Comment: 10 pages; 2 figures, 4 tables; conference - International Conference On Computational Vision and Bio Inspired Computing 2017 (http://iccvbic.com/) (accepted