2020 IEEE International Conference for Convergence in Engineering
Comparison of deep CNN and ResNet for
Handwritten Devanagari Character Recognition
Suprava Patnaik
School of Electronics KIIT School of Electronics, KIIT
Bhubaneswar, India
Suprava.patnaikfet@kiit.ac.in
Abstract—Handwritten Optical Character Recognition is a
lush area of research and is used in various real time
applications. This research is based on comparative analysis of
handwritten OCR by using Deep CNN and ResNet for
Devanagari script, a regional language. Devanagari character
contains two elements, diacritics and the main grapheme. Key
challenge associated with Devanagari script is many a time
different characters look similar. Secondly some characters are
written differently by different individuals. Proposed ResNet
manages vanishing gradient issue and improves capability of
traditional Deep CNN. It uses dynamic flow of activation.
ResNet identity blocks help in to overcome vanishing gradient
issues. Proposed architecture scored close to 99% accuracy for
the DHCD, which is better than other state-of-art results.
Training phase of proposed model is reasonably less than many
other variants of deep CNN.
Keywords—CNN, Confusion Matrix, Handwritten
Devanagari character, residual neural network
I. INTRODUCTION
Devanagari script is an Indic script and forms a basis for
over 100 languages. It consists of 47 primary alphabets, 14
vowels, 33 consonants, and 10 digits. Apart from individual
characters, the alphabets are modified when a vowel is added
to a consonant. Apart from being a royal script Devanagari is
the the mother to more than 20 auxiliary script. Basic
Devanagari characters are called aksharas. Handwritten
aksharas are dynamic in both morphological and diacritic
forms. Morphological variations are noticed in forms of
width, height, curvatures etc. Diacritics are variation of
various glyptic art of writing, for example stroke size, stoke
directions, retracing, ascending or descending motions, size
of dots, size of loops, etc.
Ongoing research on handwritten script recognition
intends to improve readability of the document, typo-graphic
translation, content analysis and integrating handwritten
documents for various language processing applications.
Unlike English Devanagari aksharas follow static phoneme
rules. Each alphabet carry assonant and well distinguishable
pronunciation and sound, which is relatively convenient for
phoneme synthesis. That is why Devanagari handwritten
recognition not only is instrumental for document analysis
but also can be serviceable for text to audio translation.
Writing with ink on paper is inevitable, therefore handwritten
character recognition is indispensable. A number of smart
devices are getting embedded with readiness to digitize
scribbling, either as we write or afterwards by making an
image of the script. Converting scrabble scripts into typed
notebook pages, which can be shared in electronics form,
will bring big difference to smart device utilization [14, 15].
To our knowledge research outcomes and literature on
Devanagari or it’s auxiliary script recognition are available
since late 1990s. Like many other computer vision
applications, for over a decade, during the initial days focus
of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) research was also
978-1-7281-7340-5/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
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Saloni Kumari Shreya Das Mahapatra
School of Electronics, KIIT
Bhubaneswar, India Bhubaneswar, India
1704211@kiit.ac.in 1704218@kiit.ac.in
confined to hand crafted feature extraction. Significant
amount of publications are available on OCR by using
moment features, skew corrections, connectivity analysis,
stroke or curve estimation, profile histogram, gradient
angles, chain codes, and so on [2]. Input pre-processing,
feature extraction and classification are the three major steps
in conventional handwritten character recognition systems.
Conventional practice is to use machine learning algorithms
to classify either or the other hand crafted features.
Fig. 1. Handwritten Devanagari characters from DHCD
Around the year 2012, a milestone was set by AlexNet
[1], which later on is considered as the beginning of a new
generation of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Since
then, ML applications have gone through revolutionary
changes and so also the handwritten character recognition
techniques. Deep learning models like Convolutional Neural
Network (CNN) [3, 6, 12], Long Short Term Memory
(LSTM) [4 & 5], and their variants have taken leading roles
in almost all ML applications. Key achievement and comfort
while using deep models for OCR is that models are excited
with raw forms of data, rather than extracting hand crafted
features such as loops, stroke angle or eccentricity of curves.
CNN networks are popular for weight sharing and are
invariant to feature translation. Deep CNN (DCNN) models
have been tested and approved for state-of-art applications
for Chinese and Latin languages [11, 13]. There are
comparatively more literature available for Chinese and
Latin scripts. Devanagari and Arabic scripts appears to be
less progressive and more challenging because of inter
character similarity and irregularity in dynamic features
while penning. In [7, 8, 9, 10] authors have reported
techniques in general for Indic scripts and Devanagari in
particular. In this work we have compared conventional
DCNN and ResNet model for Devanagari character
recognition.
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 2020 IEEE International Conference for Convergence in Engineering
II. DEEP RESNET
A. Deep NN for handwritten character recognition
In the CNN framework features are extracted and
manifested in a hierarchical manner. Higher level abstraction
are constructed from combinations of lower level
abstractions. Standard practice is to use a pre-trained DNN
for some desired application, which is known as transfer
learning. In [10] authors have reported 95.46% accuracy for
Devanagari character recognition. In [18] it has been
reported that besides transfer learning, large dataset along
with dropout layers can improve the performance of DCNN
significantly. Dropout introduces regularization on network
activation flow, which randomly skip some connection with
certain probability and improves generalization ability of the
model. Implementation of deep Capsule Network (CapsNet)
is reported in [18] with 99% accuracy, however it is reported
that this model took approximately five hours to train on a
2.5GHz and 8GB machine. CapsNet, is a variant of DCNN
which addresses the vanishing gradient problem of DCNN
by introducing dynamic routing between capsules. Capsules
are groups of neurons that encode spatial information as well
as the probability of an object being present with reference to
specific type of entity, which are object parts. Length and
orientation of capsules are altered in order to realize the
whole object. Capsules are associated with an activity vector
which corresponds to the probability of existence of capsule
entity. Besides the activity vector capsule orientation
represent to the instantiate parameters of the entity.
B. Why ResNet
Fig. 2. (a) Schematic of DCNN
Fig. 2. (b) ResNet identity block
Fig. 2. (c) ResNet convolutional block
Fig. 2. Schematic of DCNN and ResNet
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Deep networks are mostly used to represent complex
functions requiring proper discernment at different level of
abstractions. However, DNN does not always work
satisfactorily. One of the barrier in training of deep network
parameters is vanishing gradients, therefore making gradient
descent learning prohibitively dragging. Residual Network
(ResNet) is one of the solutions to it. It allows activation to
skip a few intermediate layers and join a deeper layer. There
are two main types of blocks which are used in a ResNet,
namely the "identity block" and the "convolutional block".
An “identity block” , is a skipped path parallel to main
sequential flow path, however holds identical dimension at
splitting and merging nodes. On the other hand a
convolutional block in the skip paths is almost same as
identity block but holds a convolutional layer. Role of skip
path convolutional block is similar to simple matrix
multiplication and does dimension alteration such that
dimension.
A weigh matrix similar to Conv2D block is used in the
shortcut path to resize the activation, so that the flow match
to the size of the main path at starting and terminating
layers. However no non-linear activation is used in the
CONV2D layer on the shortcut path. The shortcut and the
main path values are added up ahead of the the ReLU
activation.
Traditionally DCNN are popular due to inherent feature
extraction and discrimination quality. Performance
improvement has remained as the main target of various
deep algorithms. However gradually focus is shifting from
parameter optimization to network architecture, such as
connection readjustments, channel boosting, attention based
information processing and so on. For deep networks, apart
from conventional DCNN models with the concept of multi-
path or cross-layer connectivity, similar to ResNet and
CapsNet, have been proved efficient for many applications.
In this work a simple 5-layered ResNet architecture have
been proposed and tested on publicly available Devanagari
dataset. Objective is to accomplish CapsNet like
performance but with a simpler model and quicker training.
III. FRAMEWORK
Goal of our work is to improve accuracy but with a
simpler model that involves less training time. Table I
demonstrates the parametric as well as performance
comparison between the two models exploited in this work.
A. About the Dataset
Results reported for this work are based on the training
done on the publicly available Devanagari Handwriting
Character Dataset (DHCD), taken from [16]. In the related
literature [17] authors have reported 98.47% accuracy.
DHCD consists of total of 92,000 images. Reports presented
in this work are based on recognizing the 72000 consonant
characters. Each consonant has contributed 1,700 samples in
form of training images and 300 samples as test images.
Training samples are further divided into training and
validation sets after splitting into 80% and 20% respectively.
The images are of 32× 32 pixels characters written in
square boxes. However some characters have similar shapes
and different characters are written in a similar way by many
subjects. Some similar and therefore difficult to recognize
cases are shown in Fig. 5.
 2020 IEEE International Conference for Convergence in Engineering

B. Proposed Deep Model

TABLE I. ARCHITECTURE AND PERFORMANCE COMPARISON

BETWEEN DCNN AND RESNET.
Model Deep CNN ResNet
Total Trainable Parameters 711,940 71,132
Epochs 100 40
Training Samples 48960 48960
Validation Samples 12240 12240
Non Trainable Parameter 0 1,884
Training Accuracy 92.56% 99.31%
Validation Accuracy 91.73% 98.67%
Optimizer rmsprop rmsprop

Deep CNN training was carried out over 100 epochs

while that of ResNet was carried out only for 40 epochs.
Experimentation are carried out by using rmsprop optimizer
and categorical_cross-entropy as the loss function for both
the models. The rmsprop tries to dampen the oscillation and Fig. 3. (c ) performance report
also chooses different learning rate for parameters. Number Fig. 3. ResNet
of parameter trained for DCNN was approximately ten times
more than the ResNet, however both the models took close
to two hours to complete training.
IV. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
A. Epochs and training accuracy
After monitoring the trend of accuracy and loss values,
for both validation and training samples, number of epochs is
set to values, such that trade off between accuracy and epoch
is optimized.
ResNet showed 100% training accuracy, however
validation accuracy rate was slightly sluggish. In comparison
to ResNet, CNN was slower in both training and validation
accuracy rate. Above experiment was conducted for different
combinations blocks. Accuracy and loss curves are shown in
Fig. 4 & Fig. 5 for the ResNet and DCNN respectively.
ResNet accuracy is found to be slightly better than the
DCNN. It is noticed that in case of DCNN class ‘tha’ is
Fig. 4. (a) Loss curve (b) Accuracy curve
being confused with class ‘yaw’ for maximum number of
instances. No such discrepancy is noticed for ResNet model.
B. Confusion Matrix and performance report
Loss curve, accuracy curve and performance report for
36 classes are shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 respectively for
ResNet and DCNN.

Fig. 4. (c ) performance report

Fig. 3. (a) Loss curve (b) Accuracy curve
Fig. 4. Deep CNN

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 2020 IEEE International Conference for Convergence in Engineering

TABLE II. SOME WRONGLY CLASSIFIED CHARACTERS is likely to be prominent and significant in case of large
dataset. Although the results for ResNet recognition are at
Confusion Index par than many state-of art achievements, there are still a few
True Level Predicted Level Deep ResNet errors which need meticulous analysis. Input augmentation
CNN and salient feature analysis may help in improving the model
‘tha’ ‘yaw’ 11 2 performance. In future, our work will focus on improving the
automatic recognition accuracy by using suitable concepts
‘waw’ ‘tra’ 9 2 and more impressive network architectures.
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