Urdu Handwritten Characters Data Visualization and Recognition Using Distributed Stochastic Neighborhood Embedding and Deep Network

In this paper, we make use of the 2-dimensional data obtained through t-Stochastic Neighborhood Embedding (t-SNE) when applied on high-dimensional data of Urdu handwritten characters and numerals. The instances of the dataset used for experimental work are classified in multiple classes depending on the shape similarity. We performed three tasks in a disciplined order; namely, (i) we generated a state-of-the-art dataset of both the Urdu handwritten characters and numerals by inviting a number of native Urdu participants from different social and academic groups, since there is no publicly available dataset of such type till date, then (ii) applied classical approaches of dimensionality reduction and data visualization like Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Autoencoders (AE) in comparison with t-Stochastic Neighborhood Embedding (t-SNE), and (iii) used the reduced dimensions obtained through PCA, AE, and t-SNE for recognition of Urdu handwritten characters and numerals using a deep network like Convolution Neural Network (CNN). The accuracy achieved in recognition of Urdu characters and numerals among the approaches for the same task is found to be much better. The novelty lies in the fact that the resulting reduced dimensions are used for the first time for the recognition of Urdu handwritten text at the character level instead of using the whole multidimensional data. This results in consuming less computation time with the same accuracy when compared with processing time consumed by recognition approaches applied to other datasets for the same task using the whole data.