Soft Computing (2021) 25:4451–4464

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-05455-w (0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().,-volV)

METHODOLOGIES AND APPLICATION

Offline handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition using eXtreme

Gradient Boosting methodology
Harmandeep Kaur1 • Munish Kumar1

Published online: 22 November 2020

 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract
Handwritten word recognition is undoubtedly a challenging task due to various writing styles of individuals. So, lots of
efforts are put to recognize handwritten words using efficient classifiers based on extracted features that rely on the visual
appearance of the handwritten text. Due to numerous real-time applications, handwritten word recognition is an important
research area which is seeking a lot of attention from researchers for the last 10 years. In this article, the authors have
proposed a holistic approach and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) technique to recognize offline handwritten
Gurumukhi words. In this direction, four state-of-the-art features like zoning, diagonal, intersection & open-end points and
peak extent features have been considered to extract discriminant features from the handwritten word digital images. The
proposed approach is evaluated on a public benchmark dataset of Gurumukhi script that comprises 40,000 samples of
handwritten words. Based on extracted features, the words are classified into one of the 100 classes based on XGBoost
technique. Effectiveness of the system is assessed based on several evaluation parameters like CPU elapsed time, accuracy,
precision, recall, F1-score and area under curve (AUC). XGBoost technique attained the best results of accuracy (91.66%),
recall (91.66%), precision (91.39%), F1-score (91.14%) and AUC (95.66%) using zoning features based on 90% data as the
training set and remaining 10% data as the testing set. The comparison of the proposed approach with the existing
approaches has also been done which reveals the significance of the XGBoost technique comparatively.

Keywords Handwritten word recognition  Feature extraction  Holistic approach  Gradient boosting  XGBoost

1 Introduction the process to recognize handwritten words (which may be

Document image analysis and recognition is one of the
significant progressions toward making society paperless.
Handwritten word recognition is an emerging field in the
domain of document analysis and recognition, which has
been a subject of deep research over the past 10 years
(Gader et al. 1996; Senior and Robinson 1998; Steinherz
et al. 1999; El-Yacoubi et al. 1999; Plamondon and Srihari
2000; Arica and Yarman-Vural 2001; Koerich et al. 2003;
Vinciarelli et al. 2004). Handwritten word recognition is
Communicated by V. Loia.
& Munish Kumar
munishcse@gmail.com
Harmandeep Kaur
harmandeepk08@gmail.com
1
Department of Computational Sciences, Maharaja Ranjit
Singh Punjab Technical University, Bathinda, Punjab, India
written using any natural language) by the machine. Words
can be written using two modes, namely online mode and
offline mode. In online mode, words are written using a pen
on a digital tablet where the pen tip directions are noted to
recognize the written word, whereas in an offline mode, the
handwritten word samples are written on a sheet of paper
using pen/pencil and then the paper sheet is fed to the
scanner to get a digitized image of the document. For
recognizing handwritten words, two approaches, namely
segmentation-based approach and segmentation free
approach, are considered. The segmentation-based
approach is also known as analytical approach, which
considers the word as a collection of individual characters.
Thus, to recognize, initially the word is divided into its
individual units (characters) and then the individual char-
acters are recognized using recognition algorithms.
Sometimes, there is existence of overlapping characters in
a word which leads to an issue in its segmentation. This
issue can be solved by the segmentation free approach to

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word recognition, which considers the whole word as an
individual entity. As this approach does not consider the
individual characters of a word separately, thus there is no
issue of explicit segmentation and the whole word is rec-
ognized using recognition algorithms. This approach is also
known as a holistic approach to word recognition. There
are several applications of the handwritten word recogni-
tion system in various areas like automation of handwritten
documents, processing of bank checks, postal automation,
signature verification, writer identification, storage of his-
torical documents, document authentication, etc.
In order to have a very high predictive capability, gra-
dient boosting technique was proposed. But its acceptance
is very limited due to take large time in order to train even
the straightforward models. This is due to the fact that this
algorithm needs a single decision tree at a time for mini-
mizing the errors of all antecedent trees in the model. In
order to overcome this issue, a new technique known as
XGBoost is proposed. In XGBoost technique, independent
trees are generated and data is arranged to lessen the
lookup time, which leads to less training time of models
and thus enhances the accuracy of classification. The key
factor which supports the accomplishment of XGBoost is
its extensibility in all scenarios. Due to this factor, the
system executes over ten times faster as compared to the
existing famous solutions on a single machine and extends
to billion examples in distributed settings. There are
numerous systematic and algorithmic optimizations avail-
able that account for the extensibility of XGBoost (Chen
and Guestrin 2016). Based on these features, XGBoost
technique has been applied to recognize offline handwritten
Gurumukhi words. Gurumukhi script is utilized to write
Punjabi language which is the official language of Punjab
state of India. Gurumukhi script comprises 41 consonants,
9 vowels, 2 symbols for nasal sounds, 1 symbol for con-
sonant lengthening and 3 subscript characters. It follows
left to right direction of writing in a horizontal way.
The main contributions of the proposed work are as
follows. Till now, no recognized work is available in off-
line handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition system. So,
the authors employed the novel approach to offline hand-
written Gurumukhi word recognition based on XGBoost
technique by considering the four state-of-the-art features,
namely zoning, diagonal, intersection & open-end points
and peak extent features. To the best of authors’ knowl-
edge, XGBoost technique has been applied for the very first
time for word recognition in Gurumukhi script. From the
past few years, holistic approach to word recognition has
been gaining a lot of attention due to better results as
compared to segmentation-based approach. So the holistic
approach to word recognition has been utilized in this
work. The proposed work has been evaluated on a public
benchmark dataset in Gurumukhi script. In Punjab state,
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H. Kaur, M. Kumar
postal letters can be written using the Gurumukhi script and
till now, no postal automation system exists in Gurumukhi
script. Hence, this article is a motivating factor in this
direction that recognizes offline handwritten Gurumukhi
words which finds its application in postal automation. The
high performance of the XGBoost technique as compared
to other algorithms motivates the authors to employ it for
the recognition purpose. So, the aim of this paper is to
explore the efficiency of XGBoost technique (Chen and
Guestrin 2016) for the proposed work.
The entire article has been organized as follows. Sec-
tion 2 represents the literature review related to character
and word recognition. The proposed approach to word
recognition is discussed in Sect. 3 which describes all the
phases of word recognition system, like, digitization, pre-
processing, feature extraction and classification. Section 4
describes the various evaluation parameters to test the
efficacy of the proposed system, whereas Sect. 5 mentions
the dataset for the proposed work. Section 6 discusses the
experimental work to evaluate the system performance.
Section 7 demonstrates the comparison between the pro-
posed approach and the existing approaches in the litera-
ture. The advantages and disadvantages of the proposed
approach are discussed in Sect. 8. Finally, inferences are
drawn in Sect. 9 with some future directions.
2 Literature review
In the literature, a lot of work has been done in recognition
of various Indic and Non-Indic scripts, which has been
presented in this section. For example, Kumar et al. (2014)
developed a new hierarchical approach to recognize offline
handwritten Gurumukhi characters. They extracted a set of
105 features employing four features, namely horizontally
peak extent features, vertically peak extent features, diag-
onal features and centroid features. To reduce the dimen-
sionality of the features, various feature selection
approaches such as Correlation-based feature selec-
tion (CFS), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and
Consistency-Based (CON) feature selection approaches
were employed. Based on dataset of 3500 character sam-
ples, they attained a recognition rate of 91.80% using PCA
and linear-kernel Support Vector Machine (SVM) classi-
fier. They (Kumar et al. 2014) also proposed two feature
extraction techniques, namely power curve fitting and
parabola curve fitting-based features to recognize offline
handwritten Gurumukhi characters. To determine the effi-
ciency of the proposed feature extraction techniques, they
also considered existing features, namely zoning, transi-
tion, diagonal, intersection and open-end points, direc-
tional, gradient and chain code features. They also used the
same dataset of 3500 samples of Gurumukhi isolated
Offline handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition using eXtreme Gradient Boosting methodology
characters to perform experiments and attained recognition
rates of 97.14% and 98.10% using SVM and k-NN,
respectively, by considering the power curve fitting-based
features. Patel et al. (2015) proposed holistic approach for
the recognition of offline handwritten English words based
on structural features which finds its application in recog-
nition of postal addresses. For classification, Euclidean
distance-based k-NN classifier was employed that achieved
90% accuracy on a dataset comprising 300 samples of 30
district names of Karnataka state. Das et al. (2016) pro-
posed Harmony Search (HS) algorithm-based feature
selection approach to recognize handwritten Bangla words
by reducing the dimensionality of features of the method
presented in the paper by Bhowmik et al. (2014). In the
mentioned paper (Bhowmik et al. 2014), to recognize
handwritten Bangla words, a set of 65 elliptical features
was considered with a recognition rate of 81.37% based on
MLP (Multilayer Perceptron) classifier. To eliminate
undesired features and to select only relevant features, HS-
based feature selection approach only considered 48 fea-
tures which reported a recognition rate of 90.29% on the
same dataset comprising 1020 words handwritten in Bangla
script. Based on comparison with two feature dimension-
ality reduction techniques, namely Genetic Algorithm
(GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), the pro-
posed Harmony Search (HS) algorithm provided better
recognition results using a holistic approach. Kumar et al.
(2016) proposed a new technique to extract features from
the pre-segmented offline handwritten Gurumukhi charac-
ters. The proposed feature extraction technique considered
the boundary extent of the character sample to extract the
desirable features which were then reduced using PCA
feature selection approach. The experiments were con-
ducted on a dataset comprising 7000 Gurumukhi character
samples using three classifiers, namely k-NN, SVM and
MLP. The best recognition rate of 93.8% was attained
using RBF-kernel SVM classifier and fivefold cross-vali-
dation approach.
Assayony and Mahmoud (2017) proposed a holistic
approach to recognize offline handwritten Arabic words
based on Gabor filters. Two types of features like statistical
Gabor features and Gabor descriptors were considered
from the word samples which were then integrated with
Bag-of-features framework for extracting the desired fea-
tures. Then, based on extracted features, the words were
recognized using SVM classifier with linear-kernel func-
tion. The proposed recognition system achieved the best
average recognition rate of 86.44% by considering exper-
iments on CENPARMI public dataset comprising Arabic
handwritten checks. Kumar et al. (2017) presented various
transformations-based techniques to recognize offline
handwritten Gurumukhi characters. The various transfor-
mation techniques used were discrete cosine
4453
transformations (DCT2), discrete wavelet transformations
(DWT2), fast Fourier transformations and fan beam
transformations. Considering experiments on a dataset of
10,500 character samples, they attained a recognition rate
of 95.8% using fivefold cross-validation technique and by
employing DCT2 features to linear-kernel SVM classifier.
To resolve the issue of scripts having less training dataset,
Bhunia et al. (2018) proposed cross-language framework to
recognize words and employed zone-wise approach to map
characters in order to locate Indian scripts that execute
training on one script having large dataset and testing on
other scripts having less samples comparatively. They
considered lexicons of sizes 1921, 1934 and 1953 for
Bangla, Devanagari and Gurumukhi scripts, respectively.
Based on experiments, the global mean average precision
rate of 66.87% (66.42) was reported for Devanagari
(Bangla) script where the Gurumukhi script was used as the
source script and the results revealed higher script simi-
larity between Bangla and Devanagari as compared to
Bangla and Gurumukhi script. Gupta et al. (2018) pre-
sented an ensemble model to combine the output of SVM
classifiers based on three features (two handcrafted and one
machine-generated features), namely Arnold transform-
based features, curvature-based features and Deep Convo-
lution Neural Network (DCNN)-based features, in order to
recognize offline handwritten words. To combine the
decisions of three classifiers, three strategies were
employed, namely vote for majority decision, vote for
strongest decision and vote for the sum of the decisions.
The proposed system achieved the best recognition rates of
95.23%, 97.16% and 95.07% on public datasets, namely
CENPARMI, ISIHWD and IAM200, respectively.
Tavoli et al. (2018) proposed a novel feature extraction
technique named as SGCSL (Statistical Geometric Com-
ponents of Straight lines) to recognize offline handwritten
Arabic/Persian words. The extracted features were then fed
to the SVM classifier for classification task. They attained
recognition rates of 67.47%, 80.78% and 86.22% by
experimenting the proposed approach on three public
datasets, namely Iran-cities, IFN/ENIT and IBN SINA
Arabic dataset, respectively. Arani et al. (2019) demon-
strated a holistic approach to recognize handwritten Farsi
words based on the fusion of three HMM classifiers that
were trained separately using three feature sets, namely
image gradient, black-white transitions and contour chain
code features. Then, the fused output of HMMs was given
to the MLP classifier for the recognition purpose. They
evaluated the approach on ‘‘Iranshahr 3’’ dataset and
attained a recognition rate of 89.06%, which is observed as
superior than independent base classifiers. In order to make
comparison possible between the proposed approach and
the existing approaches in Gurumukhi script, Kumar et al.
(2019) developed seven benchmark datasets in Gurumukhi
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script, namely HWR-Gurmukhi_1.1, HWR-Gurmukhi_1.2,
HWR-Gurmukhi_1.3, HWR-Gurmukhi_2.1, HWR-Gur-
mukhi_2.2, HWR-Gurmukhi_2.3 and HWR-Gur-
mukhi_3.1. Each of HWR-Gurmukhi_1.1, HWR-
Gurmukhi_1.2, HWR-Gurmukhi_1.3 benchmark datasets
comprise 3500 character samples, whereas HWR-Gur-
mukhi_2.1, HWR-Gurmukhi_2.2, HWR-Gurmukhi_2.3
comprise 5600 character samples, individually and the last
benchmark dataset HWR-Gurmukhi_3.1 comprises 7000
character samples. They also performed experiments on the
proposed datasets using k-NN, RBF-SVM, MLP, neural
network, decision tree and random forest classifiers by
considering existing features, namely zoning features,
diagonal features, intersection & open-end points features,
directional features, transition features and centroid fea-
tures and reported results based on Precision rate, False
Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR).
These benchmark datasets are publicly available at https://
sites.google.com/view/gurmukhi-benchmark/. Wu et al.
(2019) proposed an approach to recognize unconstrained
offline handwritten words based on integration of position
embeds with residual networks (ResNets). Based on this
integration, generated outputs were given as an input to
bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks
for recognition of characters. They reported results of
91.97% accuracy and 1.79%-character error rate on two
standard datasets, namely 2017 ICDAR IEHHR competi-
tion and RIMES datasets, respectively.
To select only relevant and discriminant characteristics
from the word images, feature selection has a significant
role. In this direction, Ghosh et al. (2019) proposed
Memetic Algorithm (MA)-based wrapper filter selection
approach to reduce the dimensionality of gradient-based
features and modified statistical and contour-based features
(SCF) in order to recognize offline handwritten Bangla
words using holistic approach. Using MLP classifier, the
proposed approach was experimented on dataset compris-
ing 7500 words handwritten in Bangla script and attained
93% recognition accuracy after applying feature selection
approach on hybrid of the considered features and gained
3.33% enhancement as compared to the rate attained
through the original feature set. They also compared MA-
based approach with Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based fea-
ture selection approach and revealed that MA achieved
better recognition accuracy comparatively, even though
GA selected less number of features. Malakar et al. (2020)
proposed GA-based hierarchical feature selection method
to minimize the shape (elliptical features) and texture
(gradient-based features) based on features extracted from
the word samples, which has been reduced by approxi-
mately 28%. They evaluated the proposed method on a
dataset of 12,000 handwritten Bangla word samples using
the MLP classification technique and attained the
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H. Kaur, M. Kumar
recognition rate of 95.30%, which is 1.28% superior in
comparison to the recognition rate attained through the
original feature set. Weldegebriel et al. (2020) proposed
hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and
XGBoost classifier to recognize handwritten Ethiopian
characters, where CNN was employed to extract features
from images and to XGBoost for recognition and classifi-
cation purpose. To conduct experiments, Handwritten
Ethiopian Character Recognition (HECR) dataset was
proposed which comprises a mixture of scripts, numerical
representations, tonal symbols, special characters, punctu-
ation and combining symbols. CNN generated error rate of
0.4630 whereas CNN-XGBoost generated error rate of
0.1612, thus reveals the superiority of the hybrid model as
compared to CNN model. An accuracy of 99.84% was
attained, which is considered as superior based on com-
parison with some existing approaches (Niu and Suen
2011; Maitra et al. 2015; Zhong et al. 2015; Ramraj et al.
2016; Katiyar et al. 2017; Younis 2017; James et al. 2019).
3 Proposed method
The proposed method recognizes offline handwritten
Gurumukhi words by following a step-by-step procedure
like going through various phases, namely digitization,
preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. For the
proposed approach, at first the offline handwritten docu-
ment comprising words is scanned in order to get a digi-
tized image of the document. After that based on
preprocessing operations, the handwritten words get
extracted from the document. The various features like
zoning features, diagonal features, intersection & open-end
points features and peak extent features are extracted from
the word image in a holistic way in order to get the desired
feature database. Then, based on features, the handwritten
words are classified and recognized using the XGBoost
technique as depicted in Fig. 1. In order to test the given
word on the proposed system, at first the system is trained
using the training dataset.
3.1 Digitization
The process of converting offline handwritten documents
into a digital form is called digitization. The digitization
phase is the first step to process the documents by computer
system whereby the digitized image is stored in the form of
bits. The digitized image gets formed using scanner which
scans the document to generate the bitmap image of the
document. In the proposed system, the authors have scan-
ned the documents at 300 dpi through the scanner.
Offline handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition using eXtreme Gradient Boosting methodology 4455

Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of

proposed offline handwritten Handwritten Test image
word recognition system document

Digitization

Training Phase Testing Phase

Pre-processing

Feature
Feature extraction
Database

Zoning, Diagonal
Intersection & open
end points and Peak
extent features

Classification based
on XGBoost

Recognized
word

3.2 Preprocessing normalization operation is applied to provide a uniform

The preprocessing phase takes place to reduce the varia-
tions in the writing styles. In the proposed system, the
authors have considered three basic preprocessing opera-
tions, namely binarization, normalization and thinning
operations, which are discussed in the following
subsections.
3.2.1 Binarization
size of 256 9 64. This size has been selected due to hor-
izontal writing style of Gurumukhi script.
3.2.3 Thinning
To minimize the text width from multiple pixels to a single
pixel, the thinning operation takes place. In the proposed
system, the authors have considered parallel thinning
algorithm proposed by Zhang and Suen (1984).

As the name implies, the binary form is generated in
binarization operation. To create the binary image, the
threshold constant is positioned between higher and lower
values which equate to white and black pixels,
respectively.
3.2.2 Normalization
Due to distinct writers and various writing styles, the size
of the words is different. So, to provide uniformity to the
words, the normalization operation takes place which
normalizes the words to uniform size. In the proposed
system, after slicing the words from the binarized image of
the document, the cropping operation is applied to elimi-
nate the white space around the word. Then, the
3.3 Feature extraction
The process of extracting the desirable features of the word
image is called feature extraction. The feature extraction
phase is significant for recognizing word images with high
recognition rate because based on the extracted features,
the word image is classified. There are various features
available to recognize word images and various combina-
tions of features have been proposed in the literature. In the
proposed system, the authors have considered only indi-
vidual features such as zoning features, diagonal features,
intersection & open-end points features and peak extent
features, without taking their combinations. These features
are discussed in the following subsections.

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4456
3.3.1 Zoning features
To extract zoning features, the word image is partitioned
into a few zones and then from each zone, the features are
extricated. These features are computed from pattern
characteristics of each considered zone. After getting
foreground pixels from n considered zones, these are nor-
malized to [0–1], thus corresponds to feature a set of
n elements.
For the proposed work, initially, the authors have par-
titioned the word image into 4 zones and then each of the 4
zones gets partitioned into 4 zones resulting in total 16
zones. Each of the 16 zones gets partitioned into 4 zones
further resulting in total 64 zones and thus the individual
features in form of foreground pixels are extracted from the
respective zones. One feature is considered from the whole
word image. Thus, total 1 ? 4?16 ? 64 = 85 zoning
features are extracted from the word image as depicted in
Fig. 2.
3.3.2 Diagonal features
To extract diagonal features, initially, the word image is
partitioned into zones. Then, as the name implies, the
features are extracted from the foreground pixels along the
diagonal of each considered zone. There are multiple
characteristics along the diagonal of each zone, so the
average of these multiple values is considered to acquire a
single value corresponding to each zone. After partitioning
the word image into a few zones as illustrated in Fig. 2, the
authors have extricated 85 diagonal features for the pro-
posed work.
3.3.3 Intersection and open-end points-based features
In order to calculate intersection & open-end point-based
features, at first, the word image is divided into considered
number of zones and then the intersection & open-end
points are calculated for each of the considered zones.
Fig. 2 Zoning features of considered Gurumukhi word
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H. Kaur, M. Kumar
Intersection point has more than one pixel in its neighbors
and the open-end point includes only single pixel in its
neighborhood. For the proposed work, the authors have
extracted 170 intersection & open-end point-based features
(85 intersection features & 85 open-end point features).
3.3.4 Peak extent features
Kumar et al. (2013) have proposed peak extent features for
the recognition of offline handwritten Gurumukhi charac-
ters. For the proposed work, the same features have been
applied to recognize offline handwritten Gurumukhi words.
For extracting these features, initially, the various zones
have been considered for the word image. Then, these
features are extricated by considering the sum of the
lengths of the peak extent that places consecutive black
pixels along each zone. Peak extent features are extracted
horizontally as well as vertically. In horizontal peak extent
features, the sum of the lengths of peak extent is taken that
place consecutive black pixels horizontally in each row of a
zone as shown in Fig. 3b, whereas in vertical peak extent
features, the sum of the lengths of peak extent that place
consecutive black pixels vertically in each column of a
zone is considered as shown in Fig. 3c. For the proposed
work, the authors have considered 170 peak extent features
(85 horizontal & 85 vertical peak extent features) from the
word image.
3.4 Classification
Based on the extracted features, the words are recognized
using the classification phase. This phase determines the
class to which the word belongs to. There are many clas-
sification algorithms available in the literature to classify
the characters and words of various Indic and Non-Indic
scripts. In the latest research, eXtreme Gradient Boosting
(XGBoost) technique is performing superior to boost the
performance of the recognition systems in the field of
pattern recognition and image processing. Thus, the
authors have employed XGBoost technique for the classi-
fication purpose.
3.4.1 eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)
eXtreme Gradient Boosting or XGBoost is an ensemble
technique that comprises sequential decision trees. So, it
also calls sequential ensemble technique. It has been pro-
posed by Chen and Guestrin (2016). It is based on a gra-
dient boosting algorithm that boosts weak classifiers
(learners) and generates a predicted model in the form of an
ensemble of weak learners. In this algorithm, initially
similar weight is assigned to all training samples. These
weights specify the probability of the record getting
Offline handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition using eXtreme Gradient Boosting methodology 4457

Fig. 3 a Zoning of bitmap word 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1

image. b Horizontally peak
extent features. c Vertically 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1
peak extent features
0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0
0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0
0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0
0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0
1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0
1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0
(a)

0 4 4 4 4 0 2 2 4 0 1 2 3 5 0 5 2
1 0 3 3 3 0 2 2 3 1 0 2 3 5 0 5 2
0 0 0 2 2 0 1 0 2 0 0 0 3 5 0 5 0
0 2 2 0 3 3 3 0 3 0 2 1 0 5 1 5 0
0 1 0 2 2 0 1 0 2 0 2 0 4 5 0 5 0
0 0 2 2 0 1 0 0 2 0 0 1 4 0 2 0 0
2 2 0 3 3 3 0 0 3 2 2 0 4 1 2 0 0
4 4 4 4 0 0 1 0 4 2 2 1 4 0 0 1 0
Sum= 23 Sum=24 2 2 2 4 5 2 5 2
(b) (c)

selected by the decision tree for the training purpose. Since Training Weighted Weighted Weighted
…
the weights are similar, so the probability of selection of all Sample Sample Sample Sample
records is equal. After training, the model is ready to
predict. After prediction, whichever records are incorrectly
classified by model, those weights get updated and thus fed 1st weak 2nd weak 3rd weak nth weak
decision decision decision decision
to the second decision tree, this model is called weak tree tree tree tree
classifier, because this has not classified all the records classifier classifier classifier classifier
correctly. For the second decision tree, whichever records
have maximum weight, those records get selected for the
training purpose. Thus, weight updation is significant in Final classifier
XGBoost. When the weight is updated for the wrong pre-
dicted results, then that is passed to the next decision tree. Fig. 4 Demonstration of eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost)
Similarly, this process continues sequentially one after
another up to nth decision tree. After combining all the dataset comprising n samples and m features D ¼ fðxi; yi )}
weak classifiers, the new final classifier gets generated (|D| = xi e Rnm , yi e Rn ), the mathematical delineation of
which generates the final class of the record. Then, the final the ensemble technique is given as follows.
classifier classifies the test sample based on the maximum X
k
of similar predictions by the weak classifiers as described y^i ¼ hk ðxi Þ; hk 2 R; ð1Þ
in Fig. 4. k¼1

where k denotes the number of trees, h represents function

3.4.1.1 Mathematical implementation XGBoost is a tree in functional space R, R denotes the set comprising all
ensemble technique which combines multiple classifica- possible classification and regression trees.
tions and regression trees (Song et al. 2016). Consider a The objective function is delineated as follows:

123
4458 H. Kaur, M. Kumar

X
n X
k • True Negative (TN) when the observation is false and is
F1 ðhÞ ¼ ^ þ
hðyi; yÞ Xðhk Þ; ð2Þ
i k¼1
where hðyi y^Þ represents the training loss function, Xðhk Þ
denotes the regularization function. h denotes the differ-
entiable convex loss function that quantifies the deviation
between prediction y^i and the target yi . The purpose of
XGBoost technique is to lessen F1 ðhÞ.
The regularization complexity can be described as
follows:
1 XT
XðhÞ ¼ cL þ k x2 ; ð3Þ
2 j¼i j
where c denotes the gamma parameter, L denotes the
number of leaves, k denotes L2 regularization term on
weights in the model, x denotes the vector score on leaves.
As XGBoost technique generates trees on the basis of
number of labels, so the time spent on training will be
based on number of classes present in the dataset.
3.4.1.2 Merits of XGBoost technique Due to the following
merits of XGBoost technique, it has been employed for the
recognition purpose.
• It is an efficient and simple to use algorithm which
provides high performance and accuracy than other
algorithms.
• It supports parallel processing and is faster in compar-
ison to Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM).
• It has inherent L1 and L2 regularization, which resolve
the overfitting problem. Due to an in-built regulariza-
tion facility, it is also known as a regularized form of
GBM.
• It has an inherent potential to handle missing values.
• It permits users to perform cross-validation at each
successive (iteration) of the boosting process and hence
it is easy to obtain the precise optimum number of
boosting iterations in a single run.
4 Evaluation parameters
To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, var-
ious evaluation parameters have been considered like CPU
elapsed time, accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score and area
under curve (AUC). There are following four important
terms that need to be considered.
• True Positive (TP) when the observation is true and is
predicted to be true.
• False Negative (FN) when the observation is true and is
predicted to be false.
predicted to be false.
• False Positive (FP) when the observation is false and is
predicted to be true.
4.1 CPU elapsed time
Elapsed time is an evaluation parameter to measure the
speed of the processor. To quantify the performance of the
processor, it is considered as inversely proportional to the
execution time. It is a superior measure to examine the
processor speed because it is less dependent on other sys-
tem components. It measures in milliseconds (ms).
4.2 Accuracy
Accuracy is defined as the proportion of the number of
correct predictions and the total number of input speci-
mens. Accuracy can also be computed in terms of positives
and negatives in case of binary classification as shown
below.
TP þ TN
Accuracy ¼ :
TP þ TN þ FP þ FN
4.3 Precision
Precision is considered as the proportion of positive iden-
tification that i correct. It can be computed as the ratio of
correct positive outcomes and the number of predicted
positive outcomes.
TP
Precision ¼ :
TP þ FP
4.4 Recall
Recall is considered as the proportion of actual positives
that are identified correctly. It is computed as the propor-
tion of correct positive outcomes and number of all rele-
vant specimens identified as positive.
TP
Recall ¼ :
TP þ FN
4.5 F1-Score
F1-Score integrates precision and recall proportionate to
certain positive class. It is computed as the weighted
average of precision and recall as shown below. It has its
best value at 1 and worst value at 0.

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Offline handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition using eXtreme Gradient Boosting methodology
Precision  Recall
F1  Score ¼ 2  :
Precision þ Recall
4.6 Area under curve (AUC)
AUC is employed for binary classification problems. It
indicates the probability that the classifier will rank a
randomly selected positive sample higher than a randomly
selected negative sample. AUC is calculated using ROC
(Receiver Operating Characteristic) curve by mapping
True Positive Rate (TPR) along y-axis against False Posi-
tive Rate (FPR) along x-axis (Fig. 5), which are explained
as below. AUC lies in the range of [0,1]. The higher the
value of the AUC, the superior is the performance of the
model.
• True Positive Rate (TPR) TPR is considered as the ratio
of positive data points that are correctly observed as
positive, with respect to all positive data points. It also
terms as sensitivity.
TP
TPR ¼ : The authors have performed experiments on the pro-
ðFN þ TPÞ
• False Positive Rate (FPR) FPR is considered as the
ratio of negative data points that are wrongly observed
as positive, with respect to all negative data points. It
also terms as specificity.
FP
FPR ¼ :
ðFP þ TNÞ
5 Dataset for the proposed work
For the experimental work, the authors have utilized the
benchmark dataset of Gurumukhi script which is publicly
available at https://sites.google.com/view/gurmukhi-bench
mark/home/word-level-gurmukhi-dataset. This dataset has
Fig. 5 Area under curve (AUC)
4459
been proposed by Kaur and Kumar (2019). They have also
presented a survey on word recognition for non-Indic and
Indic scripts (Kaur and Kumar 2018). This dataset com-
prises 40,000 samples of 100 place names written by 40
different writers, where each writer has written each word
10 times. Table 1 illustrates the few samples of the dataset
written by 4 different writers.
6 Experimental results and discussion
In this segment, the experiments on the proposed system
are presented by considering the mentioned evaluation
parameters. For performing experiments on the considered
dataset, the dataset has been divided into training and
testing sets using three partitioning strategies as depicted in
Table 2. In the strategy a, 90% data is considered in the
training set and remaining 10% data is considered in the
testing set. The strategy b considers 80% data in the
training set and 20% data in the testing set, whereas last
strategy c considers 70% data in the training set and
remaining 30% data in the testing set.
posed system using four feature extraction techniques,
namely zoning features, diagonal features, intersection &
open-end point features and peak extent features. Then, the
feature wise results are reported based on six evaluation
parameters, namely CPU elapsed time, accuracy, precision,
recall, F1-score, AUC by considering the XGBoost tech-
nique as discussed below.
6.1 Performance based on zoning features
Based on zoning features, the best accuracy rate, precision
rate, recall rate, F1-score and AUC of 91.66%, 91.39%,
91.66%, 91.14% and 95.66% are achieved, respectively, by
considering 90% data in the training set and 10% data in
the testing set as shown in Table 3. By employing only
zoning features to XGBoost technique, the best CPU
Elapsed time is 43.63 ms based on 80:20 partitioning
strategy. Thus, the best rates are reported using strategy
a (90:10).
6.2 Performance based on diagonal features
Using diagonal features as an input to XGBoost technique,
the authors have attained the best accuracy and recall rates
of 91.30% and an AUC of 95.47% based on 90% training
and 10% testing set, whereas the best precision and F1-
score of 91.03% and 90.88% are reported, respectively,
based on 80:20 ratio of training and testing set as depicted
in Table 4. The best CPU elapsed time reported is
42.77 ms using 70:30 partitioning strategy.
123
4460 H. Kaur, M. Kumar

Table 1 Handwritten
Gurumukhi word samples Script
W1 W2 W3 W4
Word

ਮਾਨਸਾ

ਮਕ
ੁ ਤਸਰ

ਮਗ
ੋ ਾ

ਸਗ
ੰ ਰਰ
ੂ

ਨਾਭਾ

Table 2 Dataset partitioning

Strategy Training:testing ratio Training set (words) Testing set (words)
strategies
a 90:10 36,000 4000
b 80:20 32,000 8000
c 70:30 28,000 12,000

Table 3 System performance

Partitioning strategy Evaluation parameters
based on zoning features
CPU Elapsed Time Accuracy Precision Recall F1 Score AUC

90:10 50.09 91.66 91.39 91.66 91.14 95.66

80:20 43.63 91.34 91.21 91.34 91.04 95.50
70:30 46.33 89.93 90.01 89.93 89.84 94.76

Table 4 System performance

Partitioning strategy Evaluation parameters
based on diagonal features
CPU Elapsed Time Accuracy Precision Recall F1 Score AUC

90:10 51.60 91.30 90.95 91.30 90.73 95.47

80:20 46.86 91.18 91.03 91.18 90.88 95.41
70:30 42.77 90.00 90.06 90.00 89.92 94.80

6.3 Performance based on intersection
and open-end points features
By employing intersection & open-end point features to the
XGBoost technique, the maximum accuracy and recall
rates are 88.37%, precision and AUC are 88.40% and
93.94%, respectively, using 90:10 partitioning strategy,
whereas the best F1-score of 87.95% has been reported
based on 80:20 partitioning strategy as illustrated in
Table 5. The authors have attained the best CPU elapsed
time of 57.20 ms using 70% training and 30% testing set.
6.4 Performance based on peak extent features
Based on peak extent features, the maximum accuracy and
recall rates of 86.27%, a precision rate of 86.13%, F1-score
of 85.73% and an AUC of 92.85% have been attained using
90:20 partitioning strategy, whereas the best CPU elapsed
time of 57.23 ms is reported using 70:30 partitioning
strategy as mentioned in Table 6.

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Offline handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition using eXtreme Gradient Boosting methodology 4461

Table 5 System performance

Partitioning strategy Evaluation parameters
based on intersection and open-
end points features CPU Elapsed Time Accuracy Precision Recall F1 Score AUC

90:10 73.51 88.37 88.40 88.37 87.87 93.94

80:20 67.28 88.31 88.24 88.31 87.95 93.91
70:30 57.20 87.22 87.54 87.22 87.21 93.35

Table 6 System performance

Partitioning strategy Evaluation parameters
based on peak extent features
CPU elapsed time Accuracy Precision Recall F1 Score AUC

90:10 79.16 86.27 86.13 86.27 85.73 92.85

80:20 64.82 84.44 84.53 84.44 84.26 91.90
70:30 57.23 83.36 83.27 83.36 83.12 91.34

7 Comparison with state-of-the-art work
and analysis
In the literature, the authors have studied various machine
learning approaches like HMM, k-NN, MLP, SVM, DCNN
and various feature dimensionality reduction approaches
such as GA, PSO and HS, which were utilized to recognize
handwritten words of various scripts. These state-of-the-art
approaches have been compared with the proposed
approach in terms of recognition accuracy as depicted in
Table 7. Due to non-availability of word recognition
approaches in Gurumukhi script, the proposed approach
has also been compared with character recognition
approaches in Gurumukhi script as presented in Table 8.
7.1 Comparative analysis
Based on comparison with the existing approaches to word
recognition, the authors have drawn the following
inferences.
• Based on a benchmark dataset of Gurumukhi script
(Kaur and Kumar 2019), the authors have achieved the
best word recognition rate of 91.66% using zoning
features which surpasses the recognition rates achieved
through some state-of-the-art methods in other scripts
(Assayony and Mahmoud 2017; Tavoli et al. 2018;
Arani et al. 2019; Kessentini et al. 2010).
• Comparatively, the proposed approach attained recog-
nition rates of 91.30%, 88.37% and 86.27% based on
diagonal features, intersection & open-end points
features and peak extent features, respectively.
• The proposed approach attained a higher recognition
rate in comparison to the approach proposed by Ghosh
et al. (2019) in the case where the latter approach
considered a hybrid of the features without using
feature selection approach. But with feature selection
approach, the latter approach surpassed the proposed
approach.
• Even without using the feature selection approach, the
proposed approach attained significant results in com-
parison to Das et al. (2016) who used HS-based feature
selection approach to minimize the dimensionality of
the set of 65 elliptical features to 48 features and
enhanced the Bangla handwritten word recognition rate
from 81.37 to 90.29%.
• Kumar et al. (2014) attained recognition rate of 91.80%
for Gurumukhi handwritten characters using a PCA
feature selection approach which is very close to the
recognition rate attained through the proposed approach
presented in this paper. Thus, the proposed approach
can provide better recognition rate using feature
selection approaches which remain a further area of
research.
• Gupta et al. (2018) achieved the best recognition rates
of 95.23%, 97.16% and 95.07% on three public
datasets, namely CENPARMI, ISIHWD and IAM200,
respectively. The spike in their recognition results is
due to the amalgamation of the outcome of SVM
classifiers based on three features, namely Arnold
transformation-based features, curvature-based features
and DCNN-based features. The same amalgamation
approach can be applied to the proposed word recog-
nition system in the future. But without hybrid
approach, the proposed system provides significant
results comparatively when the former approach was
tested on Arnold transformation-based features and
curvature-based features individually.
• As elucidated in Table 8, SVM classifier is mostly used
classifier in character recognition of Gurumukhi script
and has provided the best result based on the power
curve fitting-based features (Kumar et al. 2014).
• It is clear from the comparative analysis that XGBoost
technique provided a better machine learning model to

123
4462 H. Kaur, M. Kumar

Table 7 Comparison of the proposed work with the existing methodologies

Authors Dataset Feature extraction approach Classification Recognition accuracy
approach

Kessentini IFN/ENIT Density and contour-based features HMM 79.8%

et al. (2010) IRONOFF 89.8%
Patel et al. 300 English word samples of 30 Structural features k-NN 90%
(2015) district names of Karnataka
state
Das et al. 1020 Bangla words HS-based feature selection approach MLP 90.29%
(2016)
Assayony and CENPARMI Gabor filters integrated with Bag-of- SVM 86.44%
Mahmoud features
(2017)
Gupta et al. CENPARMI Arnold transform-based features, SVM 95.23%
(2018) ISIHWD curvature-based features and DCNN- 97.16%
based features
IAM200 95.07%
Tavoli et al. Iran-cities SGCSL SVM 67.47%
(2018) IFN/ENIT 80.78%
IBN SINA 86.22%
Arani et al. Iranshahr 3 Image gradient, black-white transitions HMM and 89.06%
(2019) and contour chain code features MLP
Ghosh et al. 7500 Bangla handwritten words Gradient-based features and modified MLP 89.67% (without feature
(2019) SCF; MA-based wrapper filter selection selection) 93% (with
approach feature selection)
Proposed 40,000 Gurumukhi handwritten Zoning features XGBoost 91.66%
approach words Diagonal features 91.30%
Intersection and open-end points 88.37%
Peak extent features 86.27%

recognize handwritten words of Gurumukhi script. But
this technique proved good in combination with several
features considered and has provided the best result in
combination with zoning features using 90:10 parti-
tioning strategy where 90% data has been used to train
the model and remaining 10% data has been used to test
the proposed model.
8 Advantages and disadvantages
of proposed approach
In this section, the authors have presented the advantages
and disadvantages of the proposed approach as an indicator
for further research in the field of word recognition.
8.1 Advantages of proposed approach
• The proposed approach extracts the features from the
complete word image without segmenting the word
image into its primitive components (characters). Thus,
it eliminates all the limitations raised through touching
characters, overlapping characters, cursive writing
style, etc. in segmentation-based approach.
• Maximum recognition accuracy of 91.66% has been
attained, which is significant based on comparison with
state-of-the-art work as delineated in Tables 7 and 8.
• Till now no postal automation system exists in Guru-
mukhi script. The proposed work is an endeavor in this
direction as this work recognizes handwritten place
names in Gurumukhi script.
• This approach can be applied to other scripts by training
the proposed model using a dataset of that script.
8.2 Disadvantages of proposed approach
• As the training time of XGBoost depends on the num-
ber of classes present in the dataset. The proposed
approach has been evaluated on 100 classes, thus
XGBoost training time is comparatively more in this
work.

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Offline handwritten Gurumukhi word recognition using eXtreme Gradient Boosting methodology 4463

Table 8 Comparison of the proposed work with the existing Gurumukhi character recognition methodologies
Authors Dataset in Gurumukhi script Feature extraction approach Classification Recognition
(character samples) approach accuracy

Kumar et al. 7000 Horizontal peak extent, vertical peak extent, shadow, Linear-SVM 95.62%
(2013) centroid features k-NN 95.48%
MLP 94.74%
Kumar et al. 3500 Horizontal peak extent, vertical peak extent, diagonal SVM 91.80% (PCA)
(2014) and centroid features
Feature selection approaches: CFS, PCA and CON
Kumar et al. 3500 Power curve fitting and parabola curve fitting-based SVM 97.14%
(2014) features k-NN 98.10%
Kumar et al. 7000 Features based on boundary extent of the character k-NN 93.8% (RBF-
(016) sample SVM SVM)
PCA MLP
Kumar et al. 10,500 DCT2, DWT2, fast Fourier transformations and fan SVM 95.8% (DCT2)
(2017) beam transformations
Proposed 40,000 Gurumukhi handwritten Zoning features XGBoost 91.66%
approach words Diagonal features 91.30%
Intersection and open-end points 88.37%
Peak extent features 86.27%

• This approach may fail for overlapped and touched
characters in a word.
• This approach may not work for overlapping words.
• The approach has been tested on limited dataset
comprising only 40,000 word samples. The results can
be enhanced by using a larger training dataset.
9 Inferences and future directions
The authors proposed a holistic approach to offline hand-
written Gurumukhi word recognition based on XGBoost
technique. A few state-of-the-art features such as zoning
features, diagonal features, intersection & open-end point-
based features and peak extent features are given as an
input to XGBoost technique to test the efficacy of the
proposed system. The proposed approach finds its appli-
cation in postal automation due to recognition of hand-
written place names of Gurumukhi script present in the
public benchmark dataset. Among all the features consid-
ered, the zoning features provide the best accuracy and
recall rate of 91.66%, a precision rate of 91.39%, F1-score
of 91.14% and an AUC of 95.66% based on 36,000 training
and 4000 testing words handwritten in Gurumukhi script.
Except zoning features, the least CPU elapsed time is
reported in the case of 70% training and 30% testing set.
The comparison of the proposed approach with the existing
approaches in character and word recognition indicates the
efficiency of XGBoost technique for the considered fea-
tures. In the future, several combinations of the features
can be tested as an input to XGBoost technique to test its
efficiency for the hybrid features. Moreover, different
feature selection techniques can be applied to reduce the
dimensionality of the original feature set in order to lessen
the burden of classification and to enhance the system
performance. The proposed approach can also be applied to
other North Indian scripts such as Devanagari which are
having a similar structure as that of the Gurumukhi script.
Compliance with ethical standards
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of
interest.
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