A two-stage CNN-based hand-drawn electrical and
electronic circuit component recognition system
Darshan S Shetty
1RN21EC040
Dept. of ECE
RNSIT
Abstract—Though handwriting recognition is a well-explored
research area for decades, there are a few sub-areas of this field
that have still not obtained much attention from the researchers.
Some examples include recognition of hand-drawn graphics
components like circuit components and diagrams. Complete
digitization of such handwritten documents is not possible with-
out automatic conversion of the said circuit diagrams. Besides,
to date, in most of the cases for commercial circuit design
purposes, concerned people manually enter the components into
the simulating software like Cadence, Spice to analyze the circuit
and judge its performance. In this work, it has been tried to
move one step towards automating this process by recognizing
the hand-drawn circuit components which are considered as the
most important step for this automation. The present endeavour
is to design a two-stage convolutional neural network (CNN)-
based model that recognizes the hand-drawn circuit components.
In the first stage, all the similar-looking (i.e., similar shape and
structure) circuit components are clustered into a single group
using visual perception and input from confusion matrix of
singlestage CNN-based classification, and in the later stage, the
circuit components belong to the same group are classified into
their actual classes. The proposed model has been evaluated on
a self-made database where 20 different classes of handdrawn
circuit components are considered. The experimental outcome
shows that the proposed two-stage classification model provides
an accuracy 97.33which is much higher than the single-stage
method, which provides an accuracy of 86.00
Index Terms—Circuit component recognition, Hand-drawn
circuit, Analog and digital, CNN model
I. I NTRODUCTION
An electrical or electronic circuit diagram is a graphical
representation containing various symbols used to represent
the circuit components such as a resistor and battery which are
connected by lines representing the wires in a real-time circuit.
Engineers, scientists, as well as students and researchers, have
to deal with circuit diagrams quite often, and they require deep
analysis of the diagrams under scrutiny as well. This involves
recognition or identification of the symbols as the first step.
Modern scenario showcases ardent inclination of researchers
as well as tech giants towards digitization of documents
[1, 2]. Digitization is converting a document into a digital
format, where the data are organized into bits. The biggest
reform that digitization has brought about is the preservation
of off-line data. It becomes especially important in large-
scale applications where manufacturers have to deal with and
keep track of huge data, typically millions of datasets. Since
Identify applicable funding agency here. If none, delete this.
rough analysis for large-scale applications in the electrical or
electronic domain is made from hand-drawn diagrams, and
often in bulk, it becomes imperative to design a model for the
detection and the recognition of the individual components,
which are extracted from the digitized version of the raw
(paper-based) images. Modern research works elaborate on the
need for digitization of images and emphasize computer-based
analysis.
Besides, concerned people can interpret the symbols of
hand-drawn circuit diagram using their knowledge and ex-
perience; however, this task thereafter requires manual inter-
vention to enter the hand-drawn components into CAD tools
like Multisim, CircuitMaker, Cadence followed by performing
related processes like simulation and analysis of the circuit
parameters. The overall process is very cumbersome and time-
taking. Also, the effort put into this rises with the complexity
of the diagrams under consideration. So it would be much
simpler if a method is devised such that components are
recognized directly from handdrawn schematics, reducing both
time and human resources. It is to be noted that to recognize
the entire hand-drawn circuit diagram one has to extract the
circuit components [3, 4] first from the circuit diagram and
then can apply circuit component recognition process.
Keeping the above facts in mind, the present work deals
with the classification of 20 different hand-drawn analog and
digital circuit components (e.g., Ammeter, Voltmeter, Inductor,
resistance and different gates) using a convolutional neural
network (CNN)-based approach which involves grouping of
visually similar components using a CNN model at the first
stage, then designing CNN models for each group to classify
the components of a group into their exact classes. It is note-
worthy that the task of recognition from hand-drawn circuit
components in offline mode possesses inherent challenges
owing to variation in drawing style, with people following
random pen-up and pen-down fashion while drawing, often
leading to erratic diagrams which may turn out to be difficult
for even the veterans to comprehend. Moreover, the low quality
of paper and ink, the natural noise and the noise appearing
while acquiring the images are the typical challenges in this
domain. Mainly these issues motivate us to design a deep
learning-based model for the said task, as conventional feature
engineering-based methods may fail to yield the desired result
 II. R ELATED W ORK
Although hand-drawn circuit component recognition is not
a well-explored research area, still literature survey reveals
that some researchers have attempted this in the past, few of
those are briefed here. Dewangan and Dhole [5] use a strategy
utilizing K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier to build a system
that directly reads the electrical circuit components from a
hand-drawn circuit image. The feature vector is prepared
using a shape-based feature extraction process considering
the geometric properties of the circuit components. Analog
components, divided into 10 classes, are used to obtain an
accuracy of around 90many major circuit components like
digital gates, transformers are not taken into consideration and
the number of circuit components used in the dataset is not
specified.
In another work, Feng et al. [6] rely on a two-dimensional
dynamic programming (2D-DP) technique allowing symbol
hypothesis generation, which can correctly segment and rec-
ognize interspersed symbols. Besides, as discriminative clas-
sifiers usually have limited capability to reject outliers, some
domain-specific knowledge is included to circumvent those
errors due to untrained patterns corresponding to erroneous
segmentation hypotheses. With a point level online mea-
surement, the experiment shows that the proposed approach
can achieve an accuracy of more than 90However, very few
components (only 9) are used and the components are drawn
using a digital pen on the digital surface
A system of offline circuit recognition and simulation
using digital image processing is proposed by Angadi and
Naika [7]. The model consists of four stages, namely pre-
processing, segmentation, support vector machine (SVM) [8]-
based circuit component classification and simulation stages,
i.e., the authors propose a complete system. In this work,
different shape-based features like average component height,
inclination, and entropy of the components are used. However,
no data regarding the number of components used, accuracy,
and size of the dataset are available.
Moetesum and Younus [9] present an effective technique
for the segmentation and recognition of electronic components
from hand-drawn circuit diagrams. Segmentation is carried out
by using a series of morphological operations [10] on the
binarized images of circuits and discriminating between three
categories of components (closed shape, components with
connected lines, disconnected components). Each segmented
component is characterized by computing the Histogram of
Oriented Gradients (HOG) descriptor [11] while classification
is carried out using an SVM classifier [12]. A segmentation
accuracy of 87.70and a classification rate of 92.00is realized
demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
However, the dataset is quite small consisting of 35 compo-
nents per class having 10 classes in total. Circuit components
like digital gates and transistors are not taken into considera-
tion.
In the work by Veena and Naik [13], the scanned image of
a diagram is pre-processed to remove noise and converted to
binary level and morphological operations are applied to obtain
a clean, connected representation using thinned lines. The
diagram is comprised of nodes (a node is any point on a circuit
where the terminals of two or more circuit elements meet),
connections and components. Using appropriate threshold on
a spatially varying object pixel density, nodes and components
of the image are segmented. By the use of shape-based features
and SVM classifier, components and nodes are classified.
However, the accuracy of classification is not mentioned. Also,
no information is available about the size of the dataset and
total classes used.
Patare and Joshi [14] propose a method to recognize com-
ponents in a hand-drawn digital logic circuit diagram. This
system uses a region-based segmentation method to segment
circuit sketch and classifies each component using SVM that
uses Fourier descriptor as the feature vector. However, an
average of only 83circuit recognition accuracy is achieved.
Edward and Chandran [15] propose a method in which the
scanned image of a diagram is pre-processed to remove noise
and then converted to a bi-level intensity image. Morpho-
logical operations are applied to obtain a clean, connected
representation using thinned lines. The diagram comprises
nodes (a node is any point on a circuit where the terminals
of two or more circuit elements meet), connections, and
components. Nodes and components are segmented using
appropriate thresholds on a spatially varying object pixel
density. Connection paths are traced using a pixel stack.
Nodes are classified using syntactic analysis. Components are
classified using a combination of invariant moments, scalar
pixel-distribution features, and vector relationships between
straight lines in polygonal representations. The node recog-
nition accuracy of 92and component recognition accuracy of
86is achieved on a database comprising 107 nodes and 449
components. However, only 9 different components are taken
into consideration and the size of the dataset is quite small.
Digital components are not taken into consideration in this
work.
A topology-based segmentation method to segment circuit
sketch and classify each component using the Fourier descrip-
tor as a feature vector for SVM is done by Liu and Xiao [16].
An accuracy rate of over 90is achieved for each component.
However, only 5 classes are considered and the dataset consists
of only 55 components per class.
Dreijer [17] aims to create an alternative to the common
schematic capture process through the use of an interactive
pen-based interface to the capturing software. Sketches are
interpreted through a process of vectorizing the user’s strokes
into primitive shapes, extracting information on intersections
between primitives, and using a naı¨ve Bayesian classifier to
identify symbol components. Training data are generated by
mutating a single definition of each symbol. The symbols
are divided into 14 classes, each class consisting of 100
symbols. The overall accuracy obtained was average. The
system confuses diodes with boxes and not gate with dc source
thus having a very low accuracy of 29and 50, respectively.
Naika et al. [18] try to recognize hand-drawn electronic
components (analog only) using a HOG-based features and
subsequently used an SVM classifier. The authors have exper-
imented on a dataset having 2000 isolated circuit component
images and the proposed method yields a 96.90recognition rate
on a 10-class problem. In their work, they have only used some
electrical components while completely ignored the digital part
and important analog components like ammeter and voltmeter.
An artificial neural network (ANN)-based model is used by
Rabbani et al. [19] to make a system that can directly read
the electrical symbols from a hand-drawn circuit image. The
recognition process involves two steps: The first step is shape-
based feature extraction, and the second one is classification
using ANN that uses a backpropagation algorithm. The ANN
is trained and tested with different hand-drawn electrical
circuit component images. The results show that their proposal
is viable, but the accuracy obtained is much lower and the
dataset used is very small in size.
Recently, Roy et al. [20] have proposed a method for
the recognition of hand-drawn electrical and electronic cir-
cuit components, with both analog and digital components
included. In this method, the pre-processed images of circuit
components are used for training and testing a recognition
model using a feature set consisting of a texture-based feature
descriptor, called HOG, and shape-based features that include
centroid distance, tangent angle, and chain code histogram
[21]. Besides, the texture-based feature is optimized using a
feature selection algorithm called ReliefF and then classified
using sequential minimal optimization (SMO) classifier [22].
It is to be noted that the current work is an extension of this
work.
The present authors come across some works which are
aligned to the current work that include sketch symbol recog-
nition (e.g., Deufemia et al. [23]), identifying handdrawn
graphics components from the textual parts (e.g., Avola et al.
[24, 25]) in an online handwritten document using machine
learning-based approaches. The authors of the work [24]
have used discriminative features like entropy, band ratio,
X scan, intersection and projection, and SVM as classifier.
While use of features like curvature and linearity along with
the 6 features used in the work [24] and extreme learning
machine (ELM) as classifier could be found in the work [25] to
perform classification of drawing symbols and texts. In another
work, Deufemia et al. [23] propose a two-stage clustering-
based approach for labelling different types sketched symbols.
In the first stage, the authors use latent-dynamic conditional
random field (LDCRF) to analyze the features of unsegmented
stroke sequences based on spatiotemporal information of the
strokes, and then select the stokes of symbol part(s) using
the contextual information. In the later stage, they group the
previously labelled stokes into symbol labels using a distance-
based clustering technique.
III. M OTIVATION AND CONTRIBUTIONS
The above discussions reflect that though few attempts have
been made by the researchers in the past, still the necessity
of circuit component recognition with substantial efficiency is
much needed. Some machine learning along with conventional
feature engineering-based (e.g., [5, 7, 15]) approaches has
also set foot to solve this problem and recorded a promising
outcome. However, on the downside, these methods have
compromised with a number of circuit components (e.g., 5
in [16], 9 in [15], and 10 in [9]) and a variety of hand-drawn
circuit components (e.g., 55 samples per class in [16], total 449
samples in [15] and 35 samples per class in [9]). Additionally,
while classifying the circuit components, these works do
not take any measure for similar-looking circuit components
(e.g., OR and NOR GATE, PNP and NPN transistor, and
ammeter and voltmeter) that might generate high inter-class
misclassification. Therefore, framing a more generic model
for the recognition of offline hand-drawn circuit components
is indeed required.
In the work [18], the authors have recorded satisfactory
recognition accuracy using a texture-based feature (i.e., HOG)
for a 10 class problem. In this work, texture representation
using a customized CNN has been extracted. In this context,
it should be mentioned that there are many recently published
good works where authors have claimed CNN can identify
texture-based features with ease [26–28]. In these research
articles, it has been mentioned that convolutional layers in any
CNN model generate different feature maps and these feature
maps can be thought of as filter banks with higher complexity
with the increase of depth. These feature maps are powerful
tools to extract texture features [29] and these feature maps
have been widely used in texture analysis. Additionally, the
authors of the work [30] have conducted different experiments
to provide evidence that CNN relies on object textures rather
than global object shapes as commonly assumed. Hence, the
authors have introduced Shape-ResNet (a modified version of
ResNet-50) to overcome the texture biases of commonly used
CNN models. These works establish the fact that CNN-based
deep learning models can be used to extract texture features
from an object. More such claims could be found in the survey
paper [31]. However, not all CNN architecture may work well
for all types of image classification problems. Therefore, here
a customized CNN model is designed.
Considering the facts mentioned above, a CNN-based model
is designed to extract texture features and eventually recognize
hand-drawn circuit components satisfactorily. Concisely, the
highlights of the present work are as follows:
Grouping of similar-looking circuit components using a
single-stage CNN-based classification and visual percep-
tion.
Designing CNN models for each group obtained in the
first stage (i.e., for classification of circuit components
within a group).
Obtained more than 10more recognition accuracy than
while recognizing the circuit components with a single-
stage classification using the CNN model.
IV. P RESENT W ORK
The present work deals with the classification of hand-drawn
electrical and electronics circuit components using a two-stage
framework where the CNN model is used as a backbone
architecture. In the first stage, the authors have performed
group-level classification (i.e., classifying a component as one
of the predefined groups) while in the second stage group-
specific classification (i.e., intra-group classification) using
the same CNN architecture is performed. It is to be noted
that the predefined set of groups for visually similar looking
circuit components (e.g., AND 13370 Neural Computing and
Applications (2021) 33:13367–13390 123 gate and NAND
gate or Ammeter and Voltmeter) is formed with the help of
the confusion matrix obtained by a single-stage classification
model and visual exploration. In this section, first the data
preparation technique is described and then the customized
CNN model designed here. The entire process in Algorithm 1
is described here, while the associated processes are described
in the following subsections.

A. Data preparation
To evaluate any recognition model, a suitable database is a
prerequisite. However, to the best of the author’s knowledge,
no such dataset is available publicly for hand-drawn circuit
component recognition. Therefore, they have prepared an in-
house dataset containing circuit components images that are
drawn by engineering students, research scholars, and faculty
members. Components belonging to 20 different classes have
been collected in a preformatted sheet, similar to the works
[32, 33]. Also there is no constraint in ink colour used for
drawing the samples. A sample of the filled-in datasheet is
shown in Fig. 1. The class index for each circuit component
as defined is shown in Table 1. In this context, it is to be
mentioned that the components are drawn by the contributors
in a complete unconstrained fashion, thus bearing several
drawing styles for the components which have, in turn, helped
the authors to establish the robustness of the proposed model.
For each circuit component, 150 sample images are collected
which have been resized to 64 * 64 pixels.
Algorithm 1 : Classification of the circuit component images
Input: Images of the circuit components
Output: Predicted class for the input images
B. Customised CNN
It is already mentioned that the authors have classified 20
different hand-drawn electrical and electronic circuit compo-
nents using a simple CNN-based model, which hereafter is
called as customized CNN. In this section, the overall archi-
tecture of this customized CNN model has been described.
In this network, first, five convolution layers with successive
max-pooling layers are used and then the final feature map
is flattened in a linear form which is hereafter called flatten
vector. Finally, two fully connected (FC) layers are used of
which the last layer maps to output classes. The CNN model
is described in brief in the following subsections.
1) Convolution Layer: Convolutional layers are the fun-
damental building blocks of any CNN model [34, 35]. The
parameters of each layer consist of a set of learnable filters.
Fig. 1. A sample filled-in datasheet containing hand-drawn electrical and
electronic circuit component images
During the forward pass, each filter is convolved with the input
image using a kernel. The output volume of a convolutional
layer is obtained by stacking the feature maps generated using
all filters along the depth dimension. It helps in extracting
features from the input image. While extracting the features,
it preserves the spatial relationship between the pixels by
extracting image features using small squares of input kernel
[36].
In this work, the original binarized input image of dimension
M * N * 1 is fitted, where M and N are original image
height and width, respectively, to the initial convolutional layer
having n1 number of filters. As a result, it generates n1 number
of feature maps at the end of the first convolutional layer.
Later, in each convolutional layer, feature maps of dimension
Mi *Ni * nj (i = 2; 4; 6; 8; j = 1; 2; 3; 4 as shown in Fig. 2) are
fed, where Mi, Ni and nj denote the height and width of each
feature map, and the number of feature maps, respectively.
The values of Mi and Ni are suitably chosen depending upon
the original image height (M) and width (N). A filter with
dimension mj * mj * nj is used where mj and nj (j = 1; 2;
3; 4; 5) represent the length of a square-shaped filter and the
number of filters (sometimes called activation functions) in
each convolutional layer. In the performed experiments, the
authors set mj = 3; 8j while varying the value of nj. They
 TABLE I
VARIOUS CLASSES OF ANALOG AND DIGITAL CIRCUIT COMPONENTS THAT ARE COLLECTED UNDER THE SCOPE OF PRESENT WORK

Class Component name Class Component name Class Component name Class Component name
1 AC source 2 Ammeter 3 AND Gate 4 Capacitor
5 DC source 6 Ground 7 Inductor 8 NAND Gate
9 NOR Gate 10 NOT Gate 11 NPN Transistor 12 OR Gate
13 PN Junction Diode 14 PNP Transistor 15 Power Supply 16 Resistor
17 Switch 18 Transformer 19 Voltmeter 20 Zener diode

also set M ¼ N ¼ 64 for the simplicity of the model. For the as probabilities. The graph of this function is shown in Fig.
convenience of the common readers, the detailed architecture 3a.
ezi
of the convolutional layers is shown in Table 2 σ(z)i = PK
2) Pooling Layer: The pooling layer is used for reducing j=1
the spatial dimension (i.e., height and width) of any feature for i = 1,..., K and z = (z1 , z2 , ..., zK )(1)
map and doing so, helps in reducing the computational power 5) ReLU: : ReLU is one of the most popular activation
required to process the data through dimensionality reduction. functions used in deep learning. If the input to the function
Besides, it is useful for generating rotational and positional is negative then the output is going to be 0 while for the
invariant dominant features from input images, thus lessening positive inputs the output remains the same as the input is. The
the chance of overfitting during training. The commonly used mathematical form of the function is shown in Eq. (2). The
variants of the pooling strategy are max-pooling and avg- graph of this function is shown in Fig. 3b. The main advantage
pooling [23]. In the proposed work, avg-pooling technique is of using ReLU in deep learning is, in a neural network all
used with kernel dimension kj * kj (where, j= 1; 2; ...; 5). The the neurons are not activated at the same time. Those getting
value of kj may be varied but, in the performed experiments, negative input are deactivated by the ReLU function.
the commonly used value, i.e., kj = 2; 8j, is chosen.
f (x) = max(0, x) (2)
3) Fully connected layer: At the end of convolution layers,
all the feature maps are flattened linearly as vectors and then
fed to FC layers that are similar to traditional multilayer per-
ceptron models with an activation function [37] like SoftMax,
sigmoid, ReLU and tanh in the output layer. In the FC layers,
MSELoss loss is minimized by the Adam optimizer with
gradient 1e4 and the corresponding learning rate is 0.0005.
The output layer is another vector that represents the number
of classes to be recognized by the underlying CNN model.
During training, the batch size is set to 10 whereas the number
of epochs is 150. Information on FC the layers of the proposed
customized CNN model is provided in Table 2.
4) Activation Function: In a neural network, activation
function is a function that decides whether a neuron should
be activated or not by calculating a weighted sum and further
adding bias with it. A neural network without an activation
function is essentially just a linear regression model. It is used
to introduce non-linearity into the output of a neuron and using
this, it makes a neural network model capable to learn and per-
form more complex tasks. In this section, two such commonly
used activation functions have been described. SoftMax: The
SoftMax function is often used in the final layer of a neural
network-based classifier. SoftMax is a function that takes input
as a vector of K real numbers (say, 2 z1;z2...;zK RK), and Fig. 2. Architecture of the customized CNN model used here. The variables
Mi and Ni (i=1,2,...,10) represent the height and width of feature maps,
normalizes it into a probability distribution consisting of K respectively, whereas nj (j=1,2,...,5) represent the number of feature maps
probabilities (say, r z i ) proportional to the exponentials of (i.e., the number of filters) at this stage. M and N represent the height and
the input numbers as shown in Eq. (1). Some components width of the input image at the beginning, respectively. The variables kj and
mj (j=1,2,...,5) represent the length of square-shaped pooling mask (at jth
in the last fully connected layer could be negative or greater pooling) and kernel (at jth convolutional layer), respectively
than one and might not sum to 1. However, after applying
SoftMax, each component will be in the interval [0, 1] and the The value of C (i.e., the number of output classes) is varied
components will add up to 1 so that they can be interpreted as per requirement
 TABLE II and 68.40 GB Disc space and Python 3 is used as a python
A RCHITECTURE OF THE CUSTOMIZED CNN MODEL THAT IS USED interpreter. Experiments are performed using 70and 30of the
THROUGHOUT THIS WORK
entire dataset as training and test samples, i.e., 105 and
Layer Input dimension feature maps(i.e., ni) Output dimension 45 samples are used per circuit component as train and
Conv1 64 *64 * 1 8 64 * 64* 8 test samples. During CNN models’ training, a set of data
Pool1 64 * 64 * 8 32 * 32* 8 augmentation techniques are applied in train samples, which
Conv2 32 * 32 * 8 16 32 * 32 *16
Pool2 32 * 32 *16 16 * 16 * 16 are rotation, dilation, erosion, and skeletonization. The batch
Conv3 16 * 16 * 16 32 16 * 16 * 32 size and number of epochs are set to 10 and 200, respectively,
Pool3 16 * 16 * 16 8 * 8 * 32 for all the following experiments.
Conv4 8 * 8 * 32 64 8 * 8* 64
Pool4 8 * 8 * 64 4 * 4 * 64
Conv5 4 * 4 * 64 128 4 * 4 * 128
Pool5 4 * 4 * 128 2 * 2 * 128
FC1 512 - 64
FC2 64 C

C. Grouping of circuit components

The customized CNN model (see Table 2) is used to classify
the hand-drawn circuit components into 20 different classes
using the 7:3 train and test split of the entire dataset. A
recognition accuracy of 86.25is achieved at this phase. It is Fig. 3. Graphical representation of a SoftMax and b ReLU functions
to be noted that the batch size and number of epochs are
set as 10 and 150, respectively, during the experiment. Next,
using the confusion matrix, shown in Fig. 4 along with the
visual understanding, the circuit components are clustered
into four different groups as shown in Table 3. To form the
groups, the authors rely on inter-class misclassification. Let,
CM (i,j)
P for i,j= 1,2, ..., 20 represent the confusion matrix.
Then PCM (i,j
C(i) > δ , (8i*6= j) is checked and i,j=1, ...,
20, where δ = [0, 1] is a predefined threshold value and,
C(i) is the number of test samples in ith class and jth class,
respectively. If the condition is true, then they are put into the
same group, i.e., by initial screening of C(i,j) . In the authors’
case, δ = 0.1 is chosen and the corresponding cells (i.e., inter-
class misclassification) that satisfy the condition are marked in
Fig. 4. Later, through visual screening, the groups are finalized
as shown in Table 3.
V. R ESULT AND D ISCUSSION
In this work, a hand-drawn analog and digital circuit
component classification is performed. To start with, first,
the circuit components are grouped into 4 groups (see Sect.
4.2) using information from the confusion matrix (see Fig.
4) obtained from the customized CNN and visual perception.
Next, the two-stage CNN-based classification is applied where Fig. 4. Confusion matrix of the circuit component classification using
first, an input circuit component is classified into any one the customized CNN. Intra-group misclassifications (Group 1: yellow color,
of the specified groups using group-level classification, and Group 2: green color, and Group 3: light blue color) are marked therein (color
figure online)
then the same is further classified as one of the components
of the group to which it has been classified into. In this
section, describe experimental setups, performance metrics, B. Performance metrics
classification performances of two-stage mechanisms, perfor- To evaluate the model performances of the present dataset
mances obtained using varied CNN architecture, and error case five popularly used performance metrics have been used that
analysis are described one after another. are recall, precision, F1-score, accuracy and specificity [32,
A. Experiment setup 39]. These metrics are defined using the following equations.
Google Colab [38] has been used to run the code with TP
runtime type as “GPU.” Google provides 12.72 GB RAM Recall = (3)
TP + FP
 TP
P recision =
TP + FN
2 ∗ recall ∗ precision
F 1 − score =
recall + P recesion
TP + TN
Accuracy =
TP + FP + TN + FN
TN
Specif icity =
TN + Fp
In these equations, TP, TN, FP and FN represent true
positive, true negative, false positive and false negative. TP
represents the number of circuit components of some class
(say, C) classified as components of class C while TN is the
number of circuit components not belonging to class C has
been classified as components of class other than C. Similarly,
FN and FP indicate the count of circuit components of class
C classified as components of class other than C and number
of circuit components misclassified as components of class C.
C. Performance on group level classification
It is already mentioned that the components are grouped
into 4 major groups using an initial level classification and
visual perception (refer to Sect. 4.3). A classification accuracy
of 99.77in the group level classification is obtained using the
CNN model (refer to Table 2) and the confusion matrix is
shown in Table 4. During this classification, only a single
component of Group 1 has been misclassified as Group 4
component, and eventually, it will be misclassified when it
passes through the group-specific classifier of Model 4 as in
that model there is no component belonging to this sample
Fig. 5. 5 Schematic representation of the two-stage CNN-based model used
for hand-drawn electrical and electronic circuit component recognition. In this
Figure, CNN Models 1–4 represent the models that are used for corresponding
group-specific classification while CNN Model 0 represents the model that is
used for group-level classification. Model Selector decides the CNN model
(i.e., one of the 4 CNN Models) to which an input circuit component will be
fed after it is assigned to a specific group
D. Performances of group-specific CNN models
After obtaining the group level information of a test sample,
it passes through the group-specific CNN model to get its
actual class label. In this section, the performances of each
group-specific classifier is provided. In this context, it is to
(4) be mentioned that while citing the performance of the group-
specific CNN models (i.e., Model 1 to Model 4 in Fig. 5), any
misclassification of the prior stage I not considered, i.e., all
(5)
the accuracies shown here are obtained on the actual test set
only.
(6)
1) 4 circuit components belong to this specific group and
96.11recognition accuracy is obtained here. The confu-
(7) sion matrix is given in Table 5.
2) Group 2 consists of 2 circuit components.100recognition
accuracy is obtained in this case.
3) It consists of 3 different circuit components and in
this case, 91.85recognition accuracy is obtained. The
confusion matrix is given in Table 6.
4) It contains 11 circuit components and recognition ac-
curacy of 98.78is obtained while recognized using the
customized CNN model. The confusion matrix is pro-
vided in Table 7
E. Performance of the two-stage classification model
In the first stage, an input circuit component is predicted into
one of the specified groups and then it is further classified into
one of the target classes within the group. In the two-stage
model, an overall recognition accuracy of 97.33is obtained.
The confusion matrix representing this result is shown in
Fig. 6. If confusion matrices shown in Figs. 4 and 6 (the
highlighted cells) are compared, then it can be see that a signif-
icant improvement for intra-group classification is obtained by
using the two-stage CNN model. The comparative recognition
accuracies for all the circuit components using single- and
two-stage classification scenarios is also provided in Fig.
7. Additionally, the authors have provided the comparison
on different performances like recall, precision and F1-score
of the single-stage and present two-stage CNN model in
Fig. 8. The results are recorded in component-wise manner.
From these results, it could safely be commented that better
recognition accuracy is obtained using the two-stage model
than that of using a single-stage classification protocol for
almost in each of the circuit components considered here.
TABLE III
S HOWS THE CONFUSION MATRIX OF GROUP - LEVEL CLASSIFICATION OF
THE CIRCUIT COMPONENTS
Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4
Group 1 179 0 1 0
Group 2 0 90 0 0
Group 3 1 0 134 0
Group 4 0 0 0 495
F. Performance on the augmented dataset
The present dataset contains only 150 samples per circuit
component and these samples are collected in a constrained
condition. Therefore, to test the effectiveness of the proposed
method in unconstrained conditions and with increased data
samples, first more samples are created by applying some
offline augmentation techniques on the actual data, then apply
the proposed method on the increased dataset. The augmented
data are prepared by first rotating each actual circuit com-
ponent image by angles -5,-10,+5and +10, respectively, and
subsequently adding some amount of Gaussian noise to the
actual as well as on the circuit component images rotated by
-5and +5 , respectively. Some examples of augmented samples
along with their original versions are shown in Table 8. The
increased dataset thus prepared contains 1050 samples per
class (150 original, 150 * 4 =600 rotated circuit images and
150 * 2 = 300 Gaussian noise added samples). The same exper-
imental setup as mentioned before on the augmented dataset
is followed. The recognition accuracy obtained is 99.34. The
confusion matrix is shown in Fig. 9 while comparative results
for all the circuit components using single- and two-stage
classification scenarios in Fig. 10. The results in terms of
recall, precision and F1-score for each circuit components
are also shown while testing on the augmented dataset. The
results are shown in Fig. 11. The rise in recognition accuracy
is due to the increased number of training samples per circuit
component generated through data augmentation. These results
clearly show that increase in data samples helps the system to
learn the input patterns more accurately.
[35]. The comparative results are shown in Fig. 12. From this
figure, it is found that the network current pooling strategy
(i.e., avg-pool) yields the highest accuracy in all of the cases
for this dataset
2) Performance by changing the number of the convo-
lutional layer: In this case, some models are considered that
are different from the number of convolution layers. Conv-
5 of the base model (refer to Fig. 2) is removed and one
more convolutional layer after conv-is added separately to
obtain two new CNN models having four and six convolutional
layers, respectively. In all these models, the avg-pool strategy
is used. The comparative results are shown in Fig. 13. From
these results, it has been found that the network with 5
convolution layers (i.e., current model) yields the highest
accuracy in all of the cases for this dataset

TABLE IV
S HOWS THE CONFUSION MATRIX WHEN CIRCUIT COMPONENTS OF G ROUP
1 ARE CLASSIFIED

AND Gate NAND Gate NOR Gate OR Gate

AND Gate 42 2 0 1
NAND Gate 0 45 0 0
NOR Gate 0 3 42 0
OR Gate 0 0 1 44

TABLE V
S HOWS THE CONFUSION MATRIX OF THE CIRCUIT COMPONENTS
BELONGING TO G ROUP 3 Fig. 6. 6 Overall confusion matrix obtained by applying the present two-stage
CNN model-based model while classifying the hand-drawn 20 different circuit
AC source Ammeter Voltmeter components. Intra-group misclassification of the first three groups (Group 1:
AC source 44 0 1 yellow colour, Group 2: green colour and Group 3: light blue colour) are
Ammeter 2 43 0 marked therein (color figure online)
Voltmeter 3 4 37

G. Tuning of parameters
As no work has been done before on this particular domain
using a deep learning model. Hence, comparative analysis with
the other deep learning models that can’t be performed have
been used to solve similar problem. However, in this section,
more experiments are performed by fitting different CNN
architectures in the proposed work. In this context, it is to be
mentioned that considering the CNN model, described in Table
2, as the base model, and by removing/adding convolutional
layers from/to a standard CNN model, many more models can
be obtained. However, for simplicity, two such variations are
Fig. 7. Comparative recognition accuracy for each circuit component using
tried with that are described in the following subsections. single-stage and two-stage classification models on the present dataset
1) Performance by changing the pooling type: In the cus-
tomized CNN model, avg-pool strategy is used. Therefore, in 3) Performances with varying number of epochs: In the
this experiment, avg-pool is substituted by max-pool strategy third experiment, the number of epochs are varied to check
 TABLE VI
S HOWS THE CONFUSION MATRIX OF THE CIRCUIT COMPONENTS BELONGING TO G ROUP 4

Capacitor DC Ground Inductor NOT PN Power Resistor Switch Transformer Zener

source Gate junction supply diode
diode Capacitor
45 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
DC 0 45 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Source
Ground 0 0 45 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Inductor 0 0 0 45 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
NOT 0 0 0 1 43 1 0 0 0 0 0
Gate
PN 0 0 0 0 0 44 0 0 1 0 0
Junction
Diode
Power 0 0 0 0 0 0 45 0 0 0 0
Supply
Resistor 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 45 0 0 0
Switch 0 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 45 0 0
Transformer 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 45 0
Zener 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 1 0 42
diode

Fig. 8. Comparative recall, precision, specificity and F1-scores for each circuit
component using single-stage and two-stage classification models

the characteristics of the models that can be constructed using
the model descriptions of Sects. 5.7.1 and 5.7.2. In total, 6
different models have been constructed. The comparative test
accuracies at different iterations of all these models have been
shown in Figs. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. In these Figures, a model
“Conv X Y-pool” indicates it uses X number of convolutional
layers and Y (avg/max) type of pooling strategy. From Figs.
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, it is observed that in the customized CNN
model (i.e., 5 convolution layers with average pooling layer),
the accuracy increases rapidly up to a certain number of epochs
and then it stabilizes to a constant value. Increasing the number
of epochs further does not improve the results. So, from these
results it can comment that the customized CNN used here
is more consistent than its alternatives. Besides, these results
show that the network using 5 convolutional layers and an
average pooling strategy provides us the best result in all the
cases.
H. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods
To compare the performance of the proposed model with
state-of-the-art methods, more experiments are performed. For
this reason, 12 different methods (among these nine existing
Fig. 9. 9 Overall confusion matrix obtained by applying the present two-
stage CNN-based classification model on the augmented dataset. Intra-group
misclassification of the first three groups (Group 1: yellow colour, Group 2:
green colour and Group 3: light blue colour) are marked therein (color figure
online)
methods, i.e., Dewangan and Dhole [5], Rabbani et al. [19],
Naika et al. [18], Liu and Xiao [16], Angadi and Naika
[7], Moetesum et al. [9], Veena and LakshmanNaik [13],
Patare and Joshi [14] and, Roy et al. [20] and three standard
deep learning models, namely AlexNet [40], ResNet [41] and
MobileNet [42]) have been implemented.
These methods have been trained and tested on the same
data (train test split is described in Sect. 5.1) for all the cases.
The comparative accuracy results are shown in Table 9. This
Table also includes the performance of present customized
CNN when it is applied following a single-stage approach (i.e.,
no group level classification performed) and termed as “single-
stage CNN.” Comparisons are also made in terms of average
recall, precision F1- score, accuracy and specificity. The same
experiments have been repeated on the augmented dataset as
well and comparative results are shown in Table 10. Here also,
Fig. 10. 0 Comparative recognition accuracy for each circuit component using
single-stage and two-stage classification models on the present augmented
dataset Fig. 13. Comparative results by varying the pooling type

1) Error case analysis: Though the recognition accuracy

of the proposed model is quite impressive, still some mis-
classification produced by this model (see Fig. 6) has been
observed. Some of the notable cases for misclassification is
described in this section.
• Most intra-class misclassification (8.14) occurs for the
circuit components belonging to Group 3. The reason
behind this is their strong structural similarity.The shape
inside the circle of an Ammeter is concave downward
and a Voltmeter is concave upward, whereas the shape of
an AC source is a combination of the two as shown in
Fig. 20. One such misclassified sample is shown in Table
Fig. 11. Recall, precision, specificity and F1-score for each circuit component 11 (sample number 3).
using two-stage classification models for the augmented dataset

all the methods have been evaluated on the dataset division

described in Sect. 5.6. From these results, it can be safely
stated that the proposed method (i.e., two-stage classification
approach) outperforms the state-of-the-art methods considered
here for comparison

Fig. 14. Variation of accuracy for Group level classification

• It has been observed that a considerable amount of mis-

Fig. 12. Comparative results by varying the pooling type
I. Testing time analysis
In Fig. 19, the variation of time taken by a model to test
a sample is shown. Here it is clearly seen that the time gets
increased with increase in convolution layer. Also, between
two models with same number of convolution layers, the
model with max pool takes more time to test a sample.
classification (3.88) among circuit components of Group
1. Upon analysis of the confusion matrix for this group
(refer to Table 5), then it has been found that 2 AND Gate
samples (out of 3 misclassified samples) are classified as
NAND Gate. These two Digital gates differ from each
other by a small shape dissimilarity, shown in Fig. 21.
Sample 2 of Table 11 shows one such misclassified circuit
component.
• Some errors have also been found when the samples
are erroneously drawn (see sample 1 and sample 4 of
Table 11). Sample 1 of Table 11 is misclassified during
group level classification, while sample 4 of this table is
misclassified during group-specific classification.
 Fig. 17. Variation of accuracy for Group-Specific Classification for Group 3

Fig. 15. Variation of accuracy for Group-Specific Classification for Group 1

Fig. 18. Variation of accuracy for Group-Specific Classification for Group 4

Fig. 16. Variation of accuracy for Group-Specific Classification for Group 2

practical cases right now. However, more work on this topic
can help to come up with a fool proof system in the future
VI. C ONCLUSION
by using state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection
In this paper, a two-stage CNN-based model that recognizes and recognition model.
various hand-drawn analog and digital circuit components
from their optically scanned version has been proposed. In
the first stage, all the similar-looking (i.e., similar shape and
structure) circuit components are grouped into a single group
and in the later stage, the circuit components belonging to the
same group are further classified into their actual class using
group-specific CNN models. When evaluated on a self-made
hand-drawn circuit component database, the proposed model
provides a reasonably good recognition accuracy (97.33) than
the single-stage classification (86) owing to the complex-
ity of the hand-drawn circuit components. Also the above
model obtains 99.34accuracy and 96.20accuracy with single-
stage classification using the augmented dataset. Although
the present technique provides a high degree of recognition
accuracy in most cases, a noticeable error of the proposed
model is its inability of recognizing very similar components
like (ammeter and voltmeter) with a higher accuracy which is
believed to be reduced by introducing novel approaches that
capture the local features more accurately.
Thus, in the future, the proposed approach can be improved
and thus can be used for industrial as well as academic
purposes. Here it should be mentioned that the present system Fig. 20. Structural similarity of AC source with voltmeter and ammeter
does not provide a 100correct result, so may not be applied in
 TABLE VII
9 TABLE SHOWING COMPARISON OF THE PROPOSED METHOD WITH SOME STATE - OF - THE - ART METHODS AND SINGLE - STAGE CNN MODEL ON THE
ORIGINAL DATASET

Method Average classification performances (in )

Accuracy Recall Precision F1-score Specificity
Dewangan and Dhole [5] 81.92 84.68 85.29 84.76 99.21
Angadi and Naika [7] 84.64 84.64 84.98 84.62 99.27
Moetesum et al. [9] 84.90 85.01 85.29 85.15 99.23
Veena and LakshmanNaik [13] 84.72 84.83 85.13 84.91 99.24
Patare and Joshi [14] 85.43 85.51 85.74 85.56 99.22
Liu and Xiao [16] 80.21 84.53 84.70 84.50 99.29
Naika et al. [18] 83.41 85.54 85.80 85.50 99.30
Rabbani et al. [19] 77.40 83.90 84.13 84.02 99.26
Roy et al. [20] 93.63 94.78 94.84 94.77 99.71
AlexNet [40] 81.24 81.21 86.45 82.13 99.01
ResNet [41] 91.85 91.85 92.46 91.65 99.68
MobileNet [42] 73.76 73.76 83.11 73.22 98.68
Single-stage CNN 86.00 86.01 87.38 86.54 99.21
Proposed Work 97.33 97.33 97.43 97.32 99.96
a Bold face score indicate the best scores.

TABLE VIII
C OMPARISON OF THE PROPOSED METHOD WITH SOME STATE - OF - THE - ART METHODS AND SINGLE - STAGE CNN MODEL ON THE AUGMENTED DATASET

Method Average classification performances (in )

Accuracy Recall Precision F1-score Specificity
Dewangan and Dhole [5] 85.53 84.59 87.78 86.60 99.23
Angadi and Naika [7] 85.91 85.90 86.23 86.11 99.31
Moetesum et al. [9] 85.80 85.80 86.12 85.82 99.38
Veena and LakshmanNaik [13] 85.48 85.52 85.79 85.56 99.27
Patare and Joshi [14] 86.10 86.10 86.29 86.17 99.34
Liu and Xiao [16] 84.83 84.82 85.10 84.80 99.22
Naika et al. [18] 85.43 85.80 86.06 85.82 99.39
Rabbani et al. [19] 84.55 84.51 84.74 84.62 99.30
Roy et al. [20] 96.86 96.22 96.25 96.23 99.48
AlexNet [40] 94.77 94.73 95.26 94.91 99.79
ResNet [41] 98.61 98.64 98.67 98.65 99.81
MobileNet [42] 91.32 91.35 92.78 91.69 99.51
Single-stage CNN 96.20 96.16 96.35 96.71 99.37
Proposed Work 99.34 99.35 99.35 99.68 99.97
a Bold face score indicate the best scores.

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A. Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the CMATER research laboratory of
the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Jadavpur
University, India, for providing us the infrastructural support.
VII. D ECLARATIONS
Conflicts of interest The authors declare that they have no
conflict of interest.
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