DevNet: An Efficient CNN Architecture for Handwritten Devanagari Character Recognition

Abstract

The writing style is a unique characteristic of a human being as it varies from one person to another. Due to such diversity in writing style, handwritten character recognition (HCR) under the purview of pattern recognition is not trivial. Conventional methods used handcrafted features that required a-priori domain knowledge, which is always not feasible. In such a case, extracting features automatically could potentially attract more interests. For this, in the literature, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been a popular approach to extract features from the image data. However, state-of-the-art works do not provide a generic CNN model for character recognition, Devanagari script, for instance. Therefore, in this work, we first study several different CNN models on publicly available handwritten Devanagari characters and numerals datasets. This means that our study is primarily focusing on comparative study by taking trainable parameters, training time and memory consumption into account. Later, we propose and design DevNet, a modified CNN architecture that produced promising results, since computational complexity and memory space are our primary concerns in design.