HDevChaRNet: A deep learning-based model for recognizing offline handwritten devanagari characters

Optical character recognition (OCR) converts text images into machine-readable text. Due to the non-availability of several standard datasets of Devanagari characters, researchers have used many techniques for developing an OCR system with varying recognition rates using their own created datasets. The main objective of our proposed study is to improve the recognition rate by analyzing the effect of using batch normalization (BN) instead of dropout in convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. So, a CNN-based model HDevChaRNet (Handwritten Devanagari Character Recognition Network) is proposed in this study for same to recognize offline handwritten Devanagari characters using a dataset named Devanagari handwritten character dataset (DHCD). DHCD comprises a total of 46 classes of characters, out of which 36 are consonants, and 10 are numerals. The proposed models based on convolutional neural network (CNN) with BN for recognizing the Devanagari characters showed an improved accuracy of 98.75%, 99.70%, and 99.17% for 36, 10, and 46 classes, respectively.