Leveraging ShuffleNet transfer learning to enhance handwritten character recognition

Handwritten character recognition has continually been a fascinating field of study in pattern recognition due to its numerous real-life applications, such as the reading tools for blind people and the reading tools for handwritten bank cheques. Therefore, the proper and accurate conversion of handwriting into organized digital files that can be easily recognized and processed by computer algorithms is required for various applications and systems. This paper proposes an accurate and precise autonomous structure for handwriting recognition using a ShuffleNet convolutional neural network to produce a multi-class recognition for the offline handwritten characters and numbers. The developed system utilizes the transfer learning of the powerful ShuffleNet CNN to train, validate, recognize, and categorize the handwritten character/digit images dataset into 26 classes for the English characters and ten categories for the digit characters. The experimental outcomes exhibited that the proposed recognition system achieves extraordinary overall recognition accuracy peaking at 99.50% outperforming other contrasted character recognition systems reported in the state-of-art. Besides, a low computational cost has been observed for the proposed model recording an average of 2.7 (ms) for the single sample inferencing.