Kurdish Handwritten character recognition using deep learning techniques

Handwriting recognition is regarded as a dynamic and inspiring topic in the exploration of pattern recognition and image processing. It has many applications including a blind reading aid, computerized reading, and processing for paper documents, making any handwritten document searchable and converting it into structural text form. High accuracy rates have been achieved by this technology when recognizing handwriting recognition systems for English, Chinese Arabic, Persian, and many other languages. However, there is not such a system for recognizing Kurdish handwriting. In this paper, an attempt is made to design and develop a model that can recognize handwritten characters for Kurdish alphabets using deep learning techniques. Kurdish (Sorani) contains 34 characters and mainly employs an Arabic/Persian based script with modified alphabets. In this work, a Deep Convolutional Neural Network model is employed that has shown exemplary performance in handwriting recognition systems. Then, a comprehensive database has been created for handwritten Kurdish characters which contain more than 40 thousand images. The created database has been used for training the Deep Convolutional Neural Network model for classification and recognition tasks. In the proposed system the experimental results show an acceptable recognition level. The testing results reported an 83% accuracy rate, and training accuracy reported a 96% accuracy rate. From the experimental results, it is clear that the proposed deep learning model is performing well and comparable to the similar to other languages handwriting recognition systems.