Enhanced ResNet-151-based fused features for optimized Bi-LSTM-DNN-aided handwritten character and digits recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a method to convert a scanned photo of“handwritten character recognition (HCR) or printed character recognition (PCR)” into a form of digital text. HCR is a version of OCR, which is remarkably modeled to identify handwritten text, while PCR aims at printed text identification. The identification of handwritten characters and digits is more complicated as compared to PCR because of the diversities in human writing styles, stokes, thickness, and curves of characters. Similarly, achievements in several computer vision tasks consider the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to give an end-to-end solution for HCR with huge success. However, the process of significant feature learning for the identification of images is complicated with little data. Hence, this paper aims to develop a new handwritten character and digit recognition model with the incorporation of a deep learning strategy. Initially, the data related to Indian languages are collected from the standard benchmark datasets. Then, the collected data are given into the feature extraction phase 1, where the ResNet 151 is used for extracting the feature set 1. Similarly, the data gathered are considered in the feature extraction phase 2, where the Optimal Ensemble Pattern extraction approach is developed with Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Gradient Patterns (LGP), Local Tetra Pattern (LTrP), and Local Vector Pattern (LVP) for extracting the significant patterns from the language data. These extracted patterns are given into the ResNet 151 for getting the feature set 2. Here, the features from ResNet 151 get optimized with the enhanced optimization algorithm with Fitness-based Sail Fish Optimizer (F-SFO). The obtained feature set 1 and optimal feature set 2 are concatenated for performing final recognition. At last, the HCR is done with the help of developed Bi-LSTM-DNN to achieve the enhanced and accurate recognition of handwritten characters of the Indian languages. The performances of character recognition are further improved with the parameter optimization in Bi-LSTM-DNN with the same enhanced F-SFO. Overall result analysis, the accuracy of the designed method attains 95.12%.