Multichannel Attention Networks with Ensembled Transfer Learning to Recognize Bangla Handwritten Charecter

Abstract: The Bengali language is the 5th most spoken native and 7th most spoken language in the world, and Bengali handwritten character recognition has attracted researchers for decades. However, other languages such as English, Arabic, Turkey, and Chinese character recognition have contributed significantly to developing handwriting recognition systems. Still, little research has been done on Bengali character recognition because of the similarity of the character, curvature and other complexities. However, many researchers have used traditional machine learning and deep learning models to conduct Bengali hand-written recognition. The study employed a convolutional neural network (CNN) with ensemble transfer learning and a multichannel attention network. We generated the feature from the two branches of the CNN, including Inception Net and ResNet and then produced an ensemble feature fusion by concatenating them. After that, we applied the attention module to produce the contextual information from the ensemble features. Finally, we applied a classification module to refine the features and classification. We evaluated the proposed model using the CAMTERdb 3.1.2 data set and achieved 92\% accuracy for the raw dataset and 98.00\% for the preprocessed dataset. We believe that our contribution to the Bengali handwritten character recognition domain will be considered a great development.