Integration of Deep Direction Distribution Feature Extraction and Optimized Attention Based Double Hidden Layer GRNN Models for Robust Cursive Handwriting Recognition

Abstract

Cursive handwriting recognition (CHWR) is an interesting area of research as it has a wide range of applications but lacks an accurate approach to provide better results due to its character shapes, the non-uniform spacing between words and within a word, diverse placements of dots, and diacritics, and very low inter-class variation among individual classes. A novel CHWR model is proposed to enhance the recognition accuracy with high global stability. The proposed model introduces three major phases: pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. In the pre-processing stage, the noise removal and binarization are adapted with the intrusion of improved adaptive wiener filtering (IAWF) and structural symmetric pixels. A hybrid deep direction distribution feature extraction (HDDDFE) approach is proposed to extract directional Local gradient histogram (LGH), column gradient histogram (CGH) features and a wavelet convolutional neural network with Block Attention Module (WCNN-BAM) is proposed to extract deep global features (GF), profile features (PF) and dynamic features (DF). A novel double hidden layer gated recurrent neural network with a feature attention mechanism (ODHL-GRNN-FAM) is proposed to offer handwritten classification results. The developed model is evaluated with the IAM database and attains an overall recognition accuracy of 98%, precision of 97%, f-measure of 97.99%, character error rate (CER) of 1.23%, word error rate (WER) of 4.8%, respectively.