Transfer and Deep Learning-Based Gurmukhi Handwritten Word Classification Model

The world is having a vast collection of text with abandon of knowledge. However, it is a difficult and time-taking process to manually read and recognize the text written in numerous regional scripts. The task becomes more critical with Gurmukhi script due to complex structure of characters motivated from the challenges in designing an error-free and accurate classification model of Gurmukhi characters. In this paper, the author has customized the convolutional neural network model to classify handwritten Gurmukhi words. Furthermore, dataset has been prepared with 24000 handwritten Gurmukhi word images with 12 classes representing the month’s names. The dataset has been collected from 500 users of heterogeneous profession and age group. The dataset has been simulated using the proposed CNN model as well as various pretrained models named as ResNet 50, VGG19, and VGG16 at 100 epochs and 40 batch sizes. The proposed CNN model has obtained the best accuracy value of 0.9973, whereas the ResNet50 model has obtained the accuracy of 0.4015, VGG19 has obtained the accuracy of 0.7758, and the VGG16 model has obtained value accuracy of 0.8056. With the current accuracy rate, noncomplex architectural pattern, and prowess gained through learning using different writing styles, the proposed CNN model will be of great benefit to the researchers working in this area to use it in other ImageNet-based classification problems.