Bangla Handwritten Character Recognition using Convolutional Neural Network with Data Augmentation

This paper proposes a process of Handwritten Character Recognition to recognize and convert images of individual Bangla handwritten characters into electronically editable format, which will create opportunities for further research and can also have various practical applications. The dataset used in this experiment is the BanglaLekha-Isolated dataset [1]. Using Convolutional Neural Network, this model achieves 91.81% accuracy on the alphabets (50 character classes) on the base dataset, and after expanding the number of images to 200,000 using data augmentation, the accuracy achieved on the test set is 95.25%. The model was hosted on a web server for the ease of testing and interaction with the model. Furthermore, a comparison with other machine learning approaches is presented.