Tifinagh Handwriting Character Recognition Using a CNN Provided as a Web Service

Abstract

Many cloud providers offer very high precision services to exploit Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, there is no provider offers Tifinagh Optical Character Recognition (OCR) as Web Services. Several works have been proposed to build powerful Tifinagh OCR. Unfortunately, there is no one developed as a Web Service. In this paper, we present a new architecture of Tifinagh Handwriting Recognition as a web service based on a deep learning model via Google Colab. For the implementation of our proposal, we used the new version of the TensorFlow library and a very large database of Tifinagh characters composed of 60,000 images from the Mohammed Vth University in Rabat. Experimental results show that the TensorFlow library based on a Tensor processing unit constitutes a very promising framework for developing fast and very precise Tifinagh OCR web services. The results show that our method based on convolutional neural network outperforms existing methods based on support vector machines and extreme learning machine.