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Segmentation-Free Bangla Offline Handwriting Recognition Using Sequential Detection Of Characters And Diacritics With A Faster R-Cnn, Nishatul Majid, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents an offline handwriting recognition system for Bangla script using sequential detection of characters and diacritics with a Faster R-CNN. This is an entirely segmentation-free approach where the characters and associated diacritics are detected separately with different networks named C-Net and D-Net. Both of these networks were prepared with transfer learning from VGG-16. The essay scripts from the Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset along with standard data augmentation techniques were used for training and testing. The F1 scores for the C-Net and D-Net networks are 89.6% and 93.2% respectively. Afterwards, both of these detection modules were fused into …