Convolutional neural network training with artificial pattern for Bangla handwritten numeral recognition

Recognition of handwritten numerals has gained much interest in recent years due to its various application potentials. The progress of handwritten Bangla numeral is well behind Roman, Chinese and Arabic scripts although it is a major language in Indian subcontinent and is the first language of Bangladesh. Handwritten numeral classification is a high-dimensional complex task and existing methods use distinct feature extraction techniques and various classification tools in their recognition schemes. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) is found efficient for image classification with its distinct features. In this study, a CNN based method has been investigated for Bangla handwritten numeral recognition. A moderated pre-processing has been adopted to produce patterns from handwritten scan images. On the other hand, CNN has been trained with the patterns plus a number of artificial patterns. A simple rotation based approach is employed to generate artificial patterns. The proposed CNN with artificial pattern is shown to outperform other existing methods while tested on a popular Bangla benchmark handwritten dataset.