Handwritten digit and Roman string recognition using gated CNN with federated learning

Abstract

Handwritten number recognition has been extensively studied in the fields of machine literacy and computer vision, with datasets like MNIST serving as benchmarks. However, handwritten Roman numeral recognition presents unique challenges due to the diverse forms and structures of Roman numerals. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines Federated Learning with advanced neural network architectures to tackle this challenge effectively. Our methodology involves data acquisition and preprocessing, including the normalization of handwritten number and Roman numeral images. We design a hybrid neural network architecture that integrates Gated Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for pixel-level feature extraction and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BGRUs) for sequence modeling. This architecture is essential for handling the complexity of recognizing both image and sequence data. Federated Learning is incorporated into our approach to train the model across multiple decentralized devices or servers while preserving data privacy. This ensures that sensitive handwritten data remains secure throughout the training process. By allowing model updates to be computed locally and aggregated without sharing raw data, Federated Learning maintains privacy and security in distributed learning environments. During training, each device computes gradients based on its local data and shares only the model updates with the central server. The central server aggregates these updates to update the global model, which is then sent back to the participating devices for further refinement. This iterative process continues until the model converges, while metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are used to evaluate the model’s performance on a separate test dataset. Our approach demonstrates promising results in accurately recognizing both handwritten integers and Roman numerals, even in the presence of noise and variability in writing styles. By combining Federated Learning with advanced neural network architectures, our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also ensures data privacy and security in distributed learning environments.