20th International Conference of Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT), 22-24 December, 2017
Isolated Bangla Handwritten Character Recognition
with Convolutional Neural Network
Mujadded Al Rabbani Alif Sabbir Ahmed
Dept. of CSE Dept. of CSE
BRAC University BRAC University
Dhaka, 1212, Bangladesh Dhaka, 1212, Bangladesh
mujadded.alif@gmail.com ahmed.sabbir13301109@gmail.com
Abstract—The handwritten character recognition (HCR) prob-
lem has been studied extensively during the last few decades with
varying level of success. Although one of the earliest optical char-
acter recognition work was done using an artificial neural net-
work, due to low computational speed and other computational
resource constraints, researchers had to move away to formulate
the HCR problem of different languages (including Bangla)
using the hand crafted features based classification methods.
The recent progress of deep learning technologies and significant
developments of parallel computing hardware have established
a solid platform for the researchers in producing state-of-the-art
reliable performance in many fields. Even though deep learning
is proving its applicability in different computer vision problems
since AlexNet was proposed in 2012, due to lack of significantly
large Bangla handwritten character dataset, Bangla HCR could
not progress far. Recently, a few initiatives have been taken
to build large scale Bangla handwritten character datasets and
made them available for public use. In this paper, we propose a
modified ResNet-18 architecture (a convolutional neural network
architecture) in recognizing Bangla handwritten characters. The
proposed method is applied to two recently created isolated
Bangla handwritten datasets. The used datasets are relatively
large and practical to apply deep learning. Using the proposed
method, we achieve the state-of-the-art recognition performance.
Index Terms—handwritten character recognition, isolated
Bangla character recognition, Convolutional Neural Network.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Bangla (also known as Bengali) is the second most popular
language in the Indian subcontinent. Being the language of 242
million people from all over the world, Bangla holds the sixth
position among the world’s most popular languages. Bangla
is the national and official language of the People’s Republic
of Bangladesh also it is one of the official languages in a
number of Indian states [1]. Bangla script consists of vowels,
consonants, conjunct consonants, digits, vowel diacritics, and
punctuation marks. The conjunct consonants consist of 2 to
3 consonants combined together to form a single character
containing complex edges. Automatic recognition of such high
variation of characters with high accuracy is a demand for
many Bangla language enabled modern applications. Unlike
many other popular languages, research on Bangla handwritten
character recognition is not sufficient so far. There are large
numbers of potential applications of Bangla HCR, such as
978-1-5386-1150-0/17/$31.00
2017
c IEEE
Muhammad Abul Hasan
Dept. of EE
KAIST
Daejeon, 34141, Republic of Korea
hasandoesit@kaist.ac.kr
automatic postal code identification, digitizing and recognizing
text on paper based documents, and automatic bank cheque
reading. All of those applications have a strong dependency
on the performance of Bangla HCR.
Recent success of deep learning technology, especially
on ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge
(ILSVRC) [2], has paved the way of recognizing many
complex large scale recognition tasks. In order to produce
high recognition performance in large scale image recognition
tasks, deep learning architectures, such as AlexNet [3], VG-
GNet [4], and ResNet [5] have already proven their capabili-
ties. The AlexNet is the pioneer in reviving neural network ma-
chinery in large scale classification tasks by transforming the
original CNN proposed in [6]. Then, the winner of ILSVRC
2014, VGGNet reinforced the notion of CNN by introducing
simpler filters with a longer architecture. Following this trend,
ResNet used an exceptional architectural which used a mod-
ular concept to construct the network for ImageNet challenge
2016. Although ResNet uses a much deeper architecture than
VGGNet-16 and VGGNet-19, the architecture convergences
faster with a smaller number of parameter. Even though the
deep learning is dominating in different research areas with
its strong discriminating capabilities, we could not test its
performance in Bangla HCR problem due to lack of having a
practically large size of Bangla handwritten character dataset.
A few recent contributions creating such datasets have paved
the way of conducting research on Bangla HCR problem.
At present we have a few significantly large isolate Bangla
handwritten character datasets, such as, [7], [8], which can be
used to test the performance in the deep learning architectures
to solve this problem.
Bangla HCR is considered as a challenging task, particularly
we consider three main challenges, such as (1) recognizing
convoluted edges, (2) distinguish between the repetition of
the same pattern in different characters, and (3) different
handwritten pattern for the same character. Bangla handwritten
characters or digits rarely have fixed sizes. It is common to
find different geometric structures between two characters.
Moreover, many of the characters have convoluted edges,
for example most of the time the handwritten structures of
characters “ ” and “ ” become very convoluted geometric
structures. Secondly, many different letters in Bangla alphabets

Fig. 1: Dissimilarity between patterns in the same handwritten
Bangla character written by different individuals.
have the repetition of the same pattern, for example “ ”,
“ ”, “ ” and “ ”, “ ”, “ ”, which makes the classifi-
cation task more challenging. Finally, writing style varies
from person to person and the geometric structure of the
characters fluctuate from sizes and angles, for example in Fig.
1 the same letter is having a different shape depending on
the writers. To solve the aforementioned challenges, in this
paper, we propose a modified ResNet-18 architecture to solve
Bangla HCR problem. The contribution of this paper is two-
fold: 1) We propose a modified ResNet-18 architecture which
is capable end-to-end learning and achieves state-of-the-art
classification performance on relatively large datasets, 2) We
provide a relative analysis of the performances of several state-
of-the-art deep learning architectures to solve the problem of
Bangla HCR which can be used as a baseline performance for
comparison in the future.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
we discuss the related works on Bangla HCR. The proposed
method is discussed in Section III. The experimental results
and relevant analysis are provided in Section IV. Finally, the
conclusion is provided in Section V.
II. R ELATED W ORK
In this section, we briefly discuss the related works on
Bangla HCR. There are a number of significant works on
Bangla HCR which can be mentioned here. Roy et al., [9]
is the pioneer of Bangla optical character recognition (OCR).
They mainly introduced the Bangla character recognition
research. Following their path, many researchers investigated
several methods in improving the performance of Bangla
OCR [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]. Hasnat
et al., [18] proposed a domain specific OCR which classify
machine printed characters as well as handwritten characters.
For feature extraction they apply Discrete Cosine Transform
(DCT) technique over the input image and for classification
Hidden Markov Model (HMM) was used. They used a simple
error correcting module that can correct splitting error due to
combination of over thresholding and segmentation problem.
Wen and Lui [19] proposed a Bangla numerals recognition
method using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Sup-
port Vector Machine (SVM). Liua et al., [20] proposed a
method of recognizing Bangla and Farsi numerals. In [21], a
local binary pattern based feature extraction method was used
to classify with K-NN algorithm. Nibaran et al., [22] proposed
a feature set representation for Bangla handwritten alphabets
recognition. Their feature set is a combination of 24 shadow
features, 8 distance features, 16 centroid features and 84 quad
tree based longest run features. With all of this they achieved
85.40% accuracy on 50 character classes dataset. The above
mentioned methods mainly used handcrafted features extracted
from a small dataset, which made it impractical for deploying
the solutions in commercial applications.
Recent methods [23], [24] using CNN, Bangla handwritten
character and digit recognition got a boost in performance
in relatively large scale datasets. Sharif et al., [25] proposed
a method on Bangla handwritten numeral classification. Their
proposed method bridged hand crafted feature using HOG with
CNN. Das et al., [26] proposed a two pass soft-computing
approach for Bangla HCR. The first pass combines the highly
misclassified classes to provide finer treatment in the second
pass. Sarkhel et al., [27] formulate the problem using a multi-
objective perspective which trained an SVM classifier using
the most informative regions of the characters. Although the
recent methods achieve higher performance accuracies than
the earlier approaches, there is a significantly large margin
left for improving the performance.
III. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
The shapes of Bangla handwritten characters and digits
are geometrically horizontal, structurally less rectangular and
more spiral. Additionally, most of the conjunct characters have
convoluted edges and similar pattern with small difference
which sometimes makes it harder to distinguish even for
human eye (especially, when it is standalone). In order to
classify such wide variety, yet strongly similar character set,
we need to deploy a classifier which is robust in discriminating
similar patterns. As the ResNet is a proven architecture in
classifying wide number of classes, we propose a modified
version of ResNet-18 architecture which is particularly robust
in classifying Bangla isolated handwritten characters.
A. Modified ResNet-18 Architecture
A deep residual network (ResNet) is composed of stacked
entities with identity loops referred to as modules. Each
module consists of a multiple convolutional layers to learn the
features in the input space. ResNet is a proven architecture
by winning 2016 version of ImageNet challenge. In this
paper, we use a ResNet architecture with a modification
which is particularly robust in classifying Bangla characters.
The proposed modified ResNet architecture is as follows. A
typical module of ResNet gets input x and generates F (x)
through pairs of convolutional and ReLU layers. The generated
F (x) is then added to the input x which is computes as
F (x) = F (x) + x. In the modified ResNet module, we add
a Dropout [28] layer after the second convolutional layer.
By adding the Dropout layer, each module produces more
generalized output with an increased regularization. In the
literature, Dropout is used by many architectures and it is
mainly applied on layers having a large number of parameters
to prevent feature adaptation and overfitting. Although it is
used as a substitution of batch normalization [29], some work,
such as [30], explained that batch normalization along with
Dropout performs better in generalization. Inspired by their
findings, we applied the above mention modification in the
proposed architecture. We keep the max pooling to 3 × 3
Fig. 2: Proposed Modified ResNet-18 architecture for Bangla HCR. In the diagram, conv stands for Convolutional layer, Pool
stands for MaxPool layer, batch norm stand for batch normalization, Relu stands for rectified linear unit activation layer, Sum
stands for the addition in ResNet, and FC stand for fully connected hidden layers. In this architecture, we have eight ResNet
modules which are modified by adding a dropout layer after the second convolutional layers.

TABLE I: Configuration detail of the convolutional layers in filter, edge thickening filter and resized the image to a square
the ResNet-18 architecture. shape with appropriate paddings by default [7]. Our input
Layer Output Layer Information images also ensured to have diversification by adding elastic
Conv1 112 × 112 7 × 7, 64 stride 2 distortions. Inspired by [32], data augmentation was done
3 × 3, maxpool stride 2 in the datasets using elastic distortions by width and height
Conv2.1 56 × 56
3 × 3, 64
Conv2.2 56 × 56 3 × 3, 64
shifting. The range was kept 0.4 for this shifting. Data Aug-
Conv3.1 28 × 28 3 × 3, 128 mentation adds multifariousness to the datasets which ensures
Conv3.2 28 × 28 3 × 3, 128 that the network is observing different samples during training
Conv4.1 14 × 14 3 × 3, 256 phase.
Conv4.2 14 × 14 3 × 3, 256
Conv5.1 7×7 3 × 3, 512
Conv5.2 7×7 3 × 3, 512
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
1×1 Average pooling, 84-d, FC, Softmax We present the experimental results and performance anal-
FLOPs 1.8 × 109
ysis in this section. We conduct experiments on an Ubuntu
machine containing Intel Core i3-2120 (3.30 GHz) CPU with
with the stride of 2 × 2 as it is described in the architecture 12 GB RAM and Nvidia 1050Ti 4GB GPU. The proposed
that decreasing the pooling size or stride do not enhance the modified ResNet-18 architecture is implemented in Keras [33]
performance when the input image size is more than 100×100 with Tensorflow [34] backend.
pixel. We use Softmax after fully connected layers as default.
A. Datasets
Figure 2 shows the proposed modified ResNet-18 architecture
and Table I shows the configuration detail of ResNet-18 In order to train and measure the performance of the
architecture. We experimented using both Root Mean Square proposed method, we use two recently introduced large
Propagation (RMSProp), Adam [31], and Stochastic Gradient datasets, called BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset [7] and CMA-
Descent (SGD) optimizers to find the global minima of the cat- TERdb dataset [8]. The BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset is the
egorical cross entropy loss function. The Adam optimizer is a latest publicly available Bangla handwriting character dataset
memory efficient and faster computing optimization technique, with 84 classes where 50 classes are vowel and consonants, 10
which is based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. classes are numeral and 24 classes are frequently used conjunct
Experimentally, Adam optimizer outperformed both RMSProp characters. This dataset contains total 166, 105 images where
and SGD optimizers. the training set consists of 132, 884 images and test set consists
of 33, 221 images. Particularly, it contains 98, 950 simple
B. Input Processing vowels and consonants, 19, 748 digits, and 47, 407 commonly
In order to have a wider variation in the input for the purpose appeared conjunct consonants. The image size of this dataset
of generalized performance of the network, we preprocess vary from 110 × 110 to 220 × 220 pixels. The handwriting
input images by inverting, removal of noise with the median of this dataset is collected from 4 to 27 year age group and
 95.10 95.5

95.00

accuracy (%)

Accuracy (%)
95

94.5

94.70

op am D 94
SPr Ad SG 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5
RM Dropout rate
(a) (b) (a) (b)

Fig. 3: Example images of Bangla characters taken from a)
BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset, b) CMATERdb3 dataset.
a small portion of the samples are collected from physically
disabled individuals. Figure 3 (a) shows a few examples taken
from the dataset. The CMATERdb dataset is another large
dataset having 231 classes of image. Among the classes, 50
belonging to simple vowel and consonants, 10 belonging to
numerals and the remaining 172 classes belonging to conjunct
consonant classes. Figure 3 (b) shows a few examples taken
from the CMATERdb dataset. BanglaLekha-Isoleted dataset
and CMATERdb dataset are relatively large dataset than the
dataset proposed in [35].
B. Experiments
As the image size varies significantly in the BanglaLekha-
Isolated dataset, selecting the right size of the input image is
crucial in achieving the optimum classification performance.
We conduct an experiment to find the optimum input size.
The experimental results is given in Fig. 4. As it can be seen,
for image size 112 × 112, the proposed modified ResNet-
Fig. 5: Fine tunning the performance by selecting best hy-
perparameters. a) Classification performance of the proposed
method using different optimizer. b) Classification perfor-
mance with the changing dropout rate. In this experiment, we
use 112 × 112 input image.
and SGD optimizers. Based on this analysis, we decide to
use Adam optimizer in the rest of the experiments. Secondly,
we investigate the performance of the proposed method using
different dropout rates. As it can be seen in Fig. 5 (b), for
dropout rate 0.2, the proposed method performs the best. The
rest of the experiments are done using dropout rate 0.2.
The proposed ResNet-18 architecture is applied on the
above mentioned two datasets to measure the performance.
The training and validation curves are reported in Fig. 6
and Fig. 7 for BanglaLekha-Isolated and CMATERdb dataset
respectively.
1
0.9

18 architecture is performing the best with highest 95.1%

Accuracy (%)

classification accuracy. 0.8

95.10 0.7
95
0.6
training accuracy
valitaion accuracy
accuracy (%)

94.30
0.5
94.10 20 40 60 80 100
94 Iterations

Fig. 6: Training and validation performance with respect to

93.20 iteration using modified ResNet-18 architecture applied on
93.2
BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset.
32 × 32 64 × 64 112 × 112 118 × 118

Fig. 4: Classification performance of the proposed modified
ResNet-18 architecture using different input image size.
The performance of the proposed method is fine-tuned
using two hyperparameters. Firstly, we experiment the effect
of different optimizer in classification performance. In this
experiment, we measure the performance using three state-
of-the-art optimizers, namely RMSProp, Adam, and SGD on
110 × 110 input images. The experimental results are given in
Fig. 5 (a). As it can be seen, using Adam optimizer, we achieve
0.4% and 0.1% performance boost than that of using RMSProp
We further investigate the performance of Bangla character
recognition using several state-of-the-art CNN models. In this
investigation, we use VGGNet-16, VGGNet-19, ResNet-18,
ResNet-34, and the proposed method on BanglaLekha-Isolated
dataset. The classification performance is reported in Fig. 8. As
it can be seen and also as expected, VGGNets are preforming
lower than the ResNets. Using VGGNet-16 and VGGNet-19,
we achieve 91.0% and 92.11% classification accuracies re-
spectively, while we achieve 94.52% and 94.59% classification
accuracies using ResNet-18 and ResNet-34 respectively. Even
though the ResNet architectures are performing significantly
 1

0.8
Accuracy (%)

0.6

0.4

0.2 training accuracy

valitaion accuracy

20 40 60 80 100
Iterations

Fig. 7: Training and validation performance with respect to

iteration using modified ResNet-18 architecture applied on
CMATERdb dataset.
Fig. 9: Confusion Matrix generated from the classification
performance on test-set of BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset.
well, we achieve 95.10% classification accuracy using our
proposed modified ResNet-18 architecture. Such performance
ensures a significant 0.51% performance boost using the
proposed modified ResNet-18 architecture. interclass confusion). Again, out of 422 test samples, there are
14 instances of class 24 are misclassified as class 35 (5.2%
interclass confusion) and out of 405 test samples, 26 instances
95.10
95 of class 35 are misclassified as class 24 (6.4% interclass
94.52 94.59
confusion). Among other misclassification, out of 430 test
94 samples, 29 instance of calss 75 are misclassified as class 10
accuracy (%)

(6.7% interclass confusion). Such confusions are hard to detect

even for human when it is handwritten and isolated.
92.11 Finally, we compare the classification performance of the
proposed method on CMATERdb dataset with several state-
91.00 of-the-art classification methods. The performance comparison
is shown in Fig. 10. As it can be seen, the proposed method
ed
9
6

outperforms the best previous performance achieved by [23]

-1
-1

-1

-3

os
et
et

et

et

op
N
N

sN

sN

Pr

by a significant margin (5.66%).

G
G

Re

Re
VG
VG

Fig. 8: Classification performance of different deep learning

95.99
architecture on BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset.
95

90.33
Figure 9 shows the confusion matrix of the classification
accuracy (%)

performance of BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset using proposed 86.43

method. As it can be seen, there is a noticeable yellow 85 84.04

spot around lower right corner which signifies the strong 81.00
confusion between class 61 (“ ”) and class 72 (“ ”). In the 77.51
experiment, we found that out of 405 test samples, there are 75.04
75 74.06
25 instances of class 61 is misclassified as class 72 (6.2%
interclass confusion) and out of 397 test samples, 81 instances
ed
M

M
M

Pr N
CN

CN
V

SV

SV

os
SV

S
+S

op

of class 72 is misclassified as class 61 (20.4% interclass

R+

R+

R+

-D
F+

CH

SL
G

TL

TL

TL
Q

+Q

+Q

confusion). This happens due to the appearance similarity

CH

H
-C

between “ ” and “ ”, which is also difficult to classify by

RS

human when they are appearing standalone. Similarly, there

Fig. 10: Performance comparison with the state-of-the-art
are a few other confusion happen between class 75 (“ ”)
method using CMATERdb dataset. Here the referred works are
and class 10 (“ ”), class 71 (“ ”) and class 80 (“ ”), and
as follows: GF+SVM [36], CH+SVM [37], QTLR+SVM [38],
class 24 (“ ”) and class 35 (“ ”). Out of 397 test samples,
CH+QTLR+SVM [8]. RS-CH+QTLR+SVM [27], DCNN [6],
there are 40 instances of class 71 misclassified as class 80
SL-DCNN [23].
(10.0% interclass confusion) and out of 397 test samples,
22 instances of class 80 misclassified as class 71 (5.5%
 V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed a modified ResNet-18 archi-
tecture that is capable of classifying Bangla handwritten
characters with state-of-the-art accuracies on two recently
proposed large Bangla handwritten character datasets. In the
proposed method, we incorporated a dropout layer in each
of the ResNet module which further enhance the capability
of ResNet architecture in Bangla HCR. Evidently, the pro-
posed modification in ResNet-18 by adding dropout layers
boosted the classification performance by a significant margin.
Experiments on two large scale Bangla handwritten character
datasets show the robustness of this model for Bangla HCR.
In order to further improve the achieved performance, we need
to investigate the problem further for finding better solution
by designing a completely new architecture for Bangla HCR.
We left that part as our future work.
R EFERENCES
[1] G. F. Simons and C. D. Fennig, Eds., Ethnologue: Languages of the
World, 20th ed. SIL International, 2017.
[2] O. Russakovsky, J. Deng, H. Su, J. Krause, S. Satheesh, S. Ma,
Z. Huang, A. Karpathy, A. Khosla, M. Bernstein, A. C. Berg, and
L. Fei-Fei, “ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge,”
International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), vol. 115, no. 3, pp.
211–252, 2015.
[3] A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and G. E. Hinton, “Imagenet classification
with deep convolutional neural networks,” in Advances in neural infor-
mation processing systems, 2012, pp. 1097–1105.
[4] K. Simonyan and A. Zisserman, “Very deep convolutional networks for
large-scale image recognition,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1556, 2014.
[5] K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Deep residual learning for image
recognition,” in Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision
and pattern recognition, 2016, pp. 770–778.
[6] Y. LeCun, L. Bottou, Y. Bengio, and P. Haffner, “Gradient-based learning
applied to document recognition,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 86,
no. 11, pp. 2278–2324, 1998.
[7] M. Biswas, R. Islam, G. K. Shom, M. Shopon, N. Mohammed, S. Mo-
men, and M. A. Abedin, “Banglalekha-isolated: A comprehensive bangla
handwritten character dataset,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.10661, 2017.
[8] N. Das, K. Acharya, R. Sarkar, S. Basu, M. Kundu, and M. Nasipuri,
“A benchmark image database of isolated bangla handwritten compound
characters,” International Journal on Document Analysis and Recogni-
tion (IJDAR), vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 413–431, 2014.
[9] A. K. Ray and B. Chatterjee, “Design of a nearest neighbour classifier
system for bengali character recognition,” IETE Journal of Research,
vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 226–229, 1984.
[10] A. Dutta and S. Chaudhury, “Bengali alpha-numeric character recogni-
tion using curvature features,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 26, no. 12, pp.
1757–1770, 1993.
[11] U. Pal and B. Chaudhuri, “Indian script character recognition: a survey,”
pattern Recognition, vol. 37, no. 9, pp. 1887–1899, 2004.
[12] T. K. Bhowmik, U. Bhattacharya, and S. K. Parui, “Recognition of
bangla handwritten characters using an mlp classifier based on stroke
features,” in International Conference on Neural Information Process-
ing. Springer, 2004, pp. 814–819.
[13] A. S. Mashiyat, A. S. Mehadi, and K. H. Talukder, “Bangla off-
line handwritten character recognition using superimposed matrices,” in
Proc. 7th International Conf. on Computer and Information Technology,
2004, pp. 610–614.
[14] U. Bhattacharya, M. Shridhar, and S. K. Parui, “On recognition of
handwritten bangla characters,” in ICVGIP. Springer, 2006, pp. 817–
828.
[15] A. A. Chowdhury, E. Ahmed, S. Ahmed, S. Hossain, and C. M.
Rahman, “Optical character recognition of bangla characters using
neural network: A better approach,” in 2nd ICEE, 2002.
[16] U. Pal and B. Chaudhuri, “Automatic recognition of unconstrained off-
line bangla handwritten numerals,” in Advances in Multimodal Inter-
facesICMI 2000. Springer, 2000, pp. 371–378.
[17] A. R. M. Forkan, S. Saha, M. M. Rahman, and M. A. Sattar, “Recog-
nition of conjunctive bangla characters by artificial neural network,” in
Information and Communication Technology, 2007. ICICT’07. Interna-
tional Conference on. IEEE, 2007, pp. 96–99.
[18] M. A. Hasnat, S. M. Habib, and M. Khan, “A high performance domain
specific ocr for bangla script,” in Novel Algorithms and Techniques In
Telecommunications, Automation and Industrial Electronics. Springer,
2008, pp. 174–178.
[19] Y. Wen, Y. Lu, and P. Shi, “Handwritten bangla numeral recognition
system and its application to postal automation,” Pattern recognition,
vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 99–107, 2007.
[20] C.-L. Liu and C. Y. Suen, “A new benchmark on the recognition of
handwritten bangla and farsi numeral characters,” Pattern Recognition,
vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 3287–3295, 2009.
[21] T. Hassan and H. A. Khan, “Handwritten bangla numeral recognition
using local binary pattern,” in Electrical Engineering and Information
Communication Technology (ICEEICT), 2015 International Conference
on. IEEE, 2015, pp. 1–4.
[22] N. Das, S. Basu, R. Sarkar, M. Kundu, M. Nasipuri et al., “An improved
feature descriptor for recognition of handwritten bangla alphabet,” arXiv
preprint arXiv:1501.05497, 2015.
[23] S. Roy, N. Das, M. Kundu, and M. Nasipuri, “Handwritten isolated
bangla compound character recognition: A new benchmark using a novel
deep learning approach,” Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 90, pp. 15–21,
2017.
[24] M. M. Rahman, M. Akhand, S. Islam, P. C. Shill, and M. H. Rahman,
“Bangla handwritten character recognition using convolutional neural
network,” International Journal of Image, Graphics and Signal Pro-
cessing (IJIGSP), vol. 7, no. 8, p. 42, 2015.
[25] S. Sharif, N. Mohammed, N. Mansoor, and S. Momen, “A hybrid deep
model with hog features for bangla handwritten numeral classification,”
in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ICECE), 2016 9th Interna-
tional Conference on. IEEE, 2016, pp. 463–466.
[26] N. Das, R. Sarkar, S. Basu, P. K. Saha, M. Kundu, and M. Nasipuri,
“Handwritten bangla character recognition using a soft computing
paradigm embedded in two pass approach,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 48,
no. 6, pp. 2054–2071, 2015.
[27] R. Sarkhel, N. Das, A. K. Saha, and M. Nasipuri, “A multi-objective
approach towards cost effective isolated handwritten bangla character
and digit recognition,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 58, pp. 172–189, 2016.
[28] N. Srivastava, G. E. Hinton, A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and
R. Salakhutdinov, “Dropout: a simple way to prevent neural networks
from overfitting.” Journal of machine learning research, vol. 15, no. 1,
pp. 1929–1958, 2014.
[29] S. Ioffe and C. Szegedy, “Batch normalization: Accelerating deep
network training by reducing internal covariate shift,” in International
Conference on Machine Learning, 2015, pp. 448–456.
[30] S. Zagoruyko and N. Komodakis, “Wide residual networks,” arXiv
preprint arXiv:1605.07146, 2016.
[31] D. Kingma and J. Ba, “Adam: A method for stochastic optimization,”
arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980, 2014.
[32] S. C. Wong, A. Gatt, V. Stamatescu, and M. D. McDonnell, “Un-
derstanding data augmentation for classification: when to warp?” in
Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), 2016
International Conference on. IEEE, 2016, pp. 1–6.
[33] F. Chollet et al., “Keras,” https://github.com/fchollet/keras, 2015.
[34] M. Abadi, A. Agarwal, P. Barham, E. Brevdo, Z. Chen, C. Citro, G. S.
Corrado, A. Davis, J. Dean, M. Devin et al., “Tensorflow: Large-scale
machine learning on heterogeneous distributed systems,” arXiv preprint
arXiv:1603.04467, 2016.
[35] U. Bhattacharya and B. B. Chaudhuri, “Handwritten numeral databases
of indian scripts and multistage recognition of mixed numerals,” IEEE
transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, vol. 31, no. 3,
pp. 444–457, 2009.
[36] S. Basu, N. Das, R. Sarkar, M. Kundu, M. Nasipuri, and D. K. Basu, “A
hierarchical approach to recognition of handwritten bangla characters,”
Pattern Recognition, vol. 42, no. 7, pp. 1467–1484, 2009.
[37] N. Das, B. Das, R. Sarkar, S. Basu, M. Kundu, and M. Nasipuri,
“Handwritten bangla basic and compound character recognition using
mlp and svm classifier,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.4040, 2010.
[38] N. Das, S. Basu, R. Sarkar, M. Kundu, M. Nasipuri, and D. Basu, “Hand-
written bangla compound character recognition: Potential challenges and
probable solution.” in IICAI, 2009, pp. 1901–1913.