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Digitizing handwriting is mostly performed using either image-based methods, such as optical character recognition, or utilizing two or more devices, such as a special stylus and a smart pad. The high-cost nature of this approach necessitates a cheaper and standalone smart pen. Therefore, in this paper, a deep-learning-based compact smart digital pen that recognizes 36 alphanumeric characters was developed. Unlike common methods, which employ only inertial data, handwriting recognition is achieved from hand motion data captured using an inertial force sensor. The developed prototype smart pen comprises an ordinary ballpoint ink chamber, three force sensors, a six-channel inertial sensor, a microcomputer, and a plastic barrel structure. Handwritten data of the characters were recorded from six volunteers. After the data was properly trimmed and restructured, it was used to train four neural networks using deep-learning methods. These included Vision transformer (ViT), DNN (deep neural network), CNN (convolutional neural network), and LSTM (long short-term memory). The ViT network outperformed the others to achieve a validation accuracy of 99.05%. The trained model was further validated in real-time where it showed promising performance. These results will be used as a foundation to extend this investigation to include more characters and subjects.

Handwritten character recognition is a challenging problem which received attention because of its potential benefits in real-life applications. It automates manual paper work, thus saving both time and money, but due to low recognition accuracy it is not yet practically possible. This work achieves higher recognition rates for handwritten isolated characters using Deep learning based Convolutional neural network (CNN). The architecture of these networks is complex and plays important role in success of character recognizer, thus this work experiments on different CNN architectures, investigates different optimization algorithms and trainable parameters. The experiments are conducted on two different types of grayscale datasets to make this work more generic and robust. One of the CNN architecture in combination with adadelta optimization achieved a recognition rate of 97.95%. The experimental results demonstrate that CNN based end-to-end learning achieves recognition rates much better than the traditional techniques.

Many people admire the Japanese language and culture, but mastering the language’s writing system, particularly handwritten kanji, presents a significant challenge. Furthermore, translating historical manuscripts containing archaic or rare kanji requires specialized expertise. To address this, we designed a new model for handwritten kanji recognition based on the concept of cross-language transfer learning using a Preact ResNet-18 architecture. The model was pretrained in a Chinese dataset and subsequently fine-tuned in a Japanese dataset. We also adapted and evaluated two fine-tuning strategies: unfreezing only the last layer and unfreezing all the layers during fine-tuning. During the implementation of our training algorithms, we trained a model with the CASIA-HWDB dataset with handwritten Chinese characters and used its weights to initialize models that were fine-tuned with a Kuzushiji-Kanji dataset that consists of Japanese handwritten kanji. We investigated the effectiveness of the developed model when solving a multiclass classification task for three subsets with the one hundred fifty, two hundred, and three hundred most-sampled classes and showed an improvement in the recognition accuracy and an enhancement in a number of recognizable kanji with the proposed model compared to those of the existing methods. Our best model achieved 97.94% accuracy for 150 kanji, exceeding the previous SOTA result by 1.51%, while our best model for 300 kanji achieved 97.62% accuracy (exceeding the 150-kanji SOTA accuracy by 1.19% while doubling the class count). This confirms the effectiveness of our proposed model and establishes new benchmarks in handwritten kanji recognition, both in terms of accuracy and the number of recognizable kanji.

In recent years, the transformer model has been widely used in computer-vision tasks and has achieved impressive results. Unfortunately, these transformer-based models have the common drawback of having many parameters and a large memory footprint, causing them to be difficult to deploy on mobiles as lightweight convolutional neural networks. To address these issues, a Vision Transformer (ViT) model, named the lightweight Vision Transformer (LW-ViT) model, is proposed to reduce the complexity of the transformer-based model. The model is applied to offline handwritten Chinese character recognition. The design of the LW-ViT model is inspired by MobileViT. The lightweight ViT model reduces the number of parameters and FLOPs by reducing the number of transformer blocks and the MV2 layer based on the overall framework of the MobileViT model. The number of parameters and FLOPs for the LW-ViT model was 0.48 million and 0.22 G, respectively, and it ultimately achieved a high recognition accuracy of 95.8% on the dataset. Furthermore, compared to the MobileViT model, the number of parameters was reduced by 53.8%, and the FLOPs were reduced by 18.5%. The experimental results show that the LW-ViT model has a low number of parameters, proving the correctness and feasibility of the proposed model.

A convolutional neural network (CNN) has been successfully applied to in-air handwritten-Chinese-character recognition (IAHCCR). However, the existing models based on CNN for IAHCCR need to convert the coordinate sequence of a character into images. This conversion process increases training and classifying time, and leads to the loss of information. In order to solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end classifier based on CNN for IAHCCR in this paper, which, to knowledge, is novel for online handwritten-Chinese-character recognition (OLHCCR). Specifically, our model based on CNN directly takes the original coordinate sequence of an in-air handwritten-Chinese-character as input, and the output of the full connection layer is pooled by global average pooling to form a fixed-size feature vector, which is sent to softmax for classification. Our model can not only directly process coordinate sequences such as the models based on recurrent neural network (RNN), but can also obtain the global structure information of characters. We conducted experiments on two datasets, IAHCC-UCAS2016 and SCUT-COUCH2009. The experimental results show a comparison with existing CNN models based on image processing or RNN-based methods; our method does not require data augmentation techniques nor an ensemble of multiple trained models, and only uses a more compact structure to obtain higher recognition accuracy.

Neural networks have made big strides in image classification. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) work successfully to run neural networks on direct images. Handwritten character recognition (HCR) is now a very powerful tool to detect traffic signals, translate language, and extract information from documents, etc. Although handwritten character recognition technology is in use in the industry, present accuracy is not outstanding, which compromises both performance and usability. Thus, the character recognition technologies in use are still not very reliable and need further improvement to be extensively deployed for serious and reliable tasks. On this account, characters of the English alphabet and digit recognition are performed by proposing a custom-tailored CNN model with two different datasets of handwritten images, i.e., Kaggle and MNIST, respectively, which are lightweight but achieve higher accuracies than state-of-the-art models. The best two models from the total of twelve designed are proposed by altering hyper-parameters to observe which models provide the best accuracy for which dataset. In addition, the classification reports (CRs) of these two proposed models are extensively investigated considering the performance matrices, such as precision, recall, specificity, and F1 score, which are obtained from the developed confusion matrix (CM). To simulate a practical scenario, the dataset is kept unbalanced and three more averages for the F measurement (micro, macro, and weighted) are calculated, which facilitates better understanding of the performances of the models. The highest accuracy of 99.642% is achieved for digit recognition, with the model using ‘RMSprop’, at a learning rate of 0.001, whereas the highest detection accuracy for alphabet recognition is 99.563%, which is obtained with the proposed model using ‘ADAM’ optimizer at a learning rate of 0.00001. The macro F1 and weighted F1 scores for the best two models are 0.998, 0.997:0.992, and 0.996, respectively, for digit and alphabet recognition.

Optical character recognition for the English text may be considered one of the most important research topics, whether, printed or handwritten. Although excellent results have been reached in the English text, there is a lack of this type of research in the Arabic text. This is because of the nature of the Arabic alphabet, and the multiplicity of forms of the same letter. Arabic handwritten character recognition (AHCR) systems involve several issues, and challenges from finding a suitable, and public Arabic handwritten text dataset phase to recognition, and classification phase passing through segmentation, and feature extraction phases. The paper objectives are: Firstly, a large, and complex Arabic handwritten characters’ dataset (HMBD) is presented for training, testing, and validation phases, as well as, discussing its collection, preparation, cleaning, and preprocessing. Secondly, we introduce a deep learning (DL) system with two convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures (named HMB1 and HMB2); with the appliance of optimization, regularization, and dropout techniques. This system can serve as a baseline for future research on handwritten Arabic text. Different performance metrics were calculated such as accuracy, recall, precision, and F1. 16 experiments were applied to the described system using HMBD, and another two datasets: CMATER, and AIA9k. Experiments’ results were captured and compared to study the effects of weight initializers, optimizers, data augmentation, and regularization on overfitting, and accuracy. He Uniform weight initializer and AdaDelta optimizer reported the highest accuracies. Data augmentation showed an improvement in the accuracies. HMB1 reported testing accuracy of 98.4% with 865,840 records using augmentation on HMBD. CMATER and AIA9k datasets were used for validating the generalization. Data augmentation was applied, and the best results were 100%, and 99.0% for testing accuracies, respectively. A cross-over validation between the described architectures, and a previous state-of-the-art architecture, and dataset was performed in two phases. First, the previous control architecture cannot generalize for the presented dataset in the current study. Second, the study described architectures generalize for the control dataset, with higher accuracies (97.3%, and 96.8% for HMB1, and HMB2, respectively), than the reported accuracy in the selected control study.

Handwritten character recognition (HCR) remains a challenging pattern recognition problem despite decades of research, and lacks research on script independent recognition techniques. This is mainly because of similar character structures, different handwriting styles, diverse scripts, handcrafted feature extraction techniques, unavailability of data and code, and the development of script-specific deep learning techniques. To address these limitations, we have proposed a script independent deep learning network for HCR research, called HCR-Net, that sets a new research direction for the field. HCR-Net is based on a novel transfer learning approach for HCR, which partly utilizes feature extraction layers of a pre-trained network. Due to transfer learning and image augmentation, HCR-Net provides faster and computationally efficient training, better performance and generalizations, and can work with small datasets. HCR-Net is extensively evaluated on 40 publicly available datasets of Bangla, Punjabi, Hindi, English, Swedish, Urdu, Farsi, Tibetan, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi, Nepali and Arabic languages, and established 26 new benchmark results while performed close to the best results in the rest cases. HCR-Net showed performance improvements up to 11% against the existing results and achieved a fast convergence rate showing up to 99% of final performance in the very first epoch. HCR-Net significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art transfer learning techniques and also reduced the number of trainable parameters by 34% as compared with the corresponding pre-trained network. To facilitate reproducibility and further advancements of HCR research, the complete code is publicly released at https://github.com/jmdvinodjmd/HCR-Net .

The paper is a comprehensive review of the current research trends in the area of Arabic language especially state-of-the-art approaches to highlight the current status of diverse research aspects of that area to facilitate the adaption and extension of previous systems into new applications and systems. The Arabic language has deep, widespread and unexplored scope to research although the tremendous effort and researches that had been done previously. Modern state-of-the-art methods and approaches with fewer errors are required according to the high speed of hardware and technology development. The focus of this article will be on the offline Arabic handwritten text recognition as it is one of the most important topics in the Arabic scope. The main objective of this paper is critically analyzing the current researches to identify the problem areas and challenges faced by the previous researchers. This identification is intended to provide many recommendations for future advances in the area. It also compares and contrasts technical challenges, methods and the performances of handwritten text recognition previous researches works. It summarizes the critical problems and enumerates issues that should be considered when addressing these tasks. It also shows some of the Arabic datasets that can be used as inputs and benchmarks for training, testing and comparisons. Finally, it provides a fundamental comparison and discussion of some of the remaining open problems and trends in that field.

Automated techniques for Arabic content recognition are at a beginning period contrasted with their partners for the Latin and Chinese contents recognition. There is a bulk of handwritten Arabic archives available in libraries, data centers, historical centers, and workplaces. Digitization of these documents facilitates (1) to preserve and transfer the country’s history electronically, (2) to save the physical storage space, (3) to proper handling of the documents, and (4) to enhance the retrieval of information through the Internet and other mediums. Arabic handwritten character recognition (AHCR) systems face several challenges including the unlimited variations in human handwriting and the leakage of large and public databases. In the current study, the segmentation and recognition phases are addressed. The text segmentation challenges and a set of solutions for each challenge are presented. The convolutional neural network (CNN), deep learning approach, is used in the recognition phase. The usage of CNN leads to significant improvements across different machine learning classification algorithms. It facilitates the automatic feature extraction of images. 14 different native CNN architectures are proposed after a set of try-and-error trials. They are trained and tested on the HMBD database that contains 54,115 of the handwritten Arabic characters. Experiments are performed on the native CNN architectures and the best-reported testing accuracy is 91.96 % . A transfer learning (TF) and genetic algorithm (GA) approach named “HMB-AHCR-DLGA” is suggested to optimize the training parameters and hyperparameters in the recognition phase. The pre-trained CNN models (VGG16, VGG19, and MobileNetV2) are used in the later approach. Five optimization experiments are performed and the best combinations are reported. The highest reported testing accuracy is 92.88 % .