Performance Comparison of Scanner and Camera-Acquired Data for Bangla Offline Handwriting Recognition
Nishatul Majid, Elisa H. Barney Smith · 2019
This paper presents a comparison of offline handwriting recognition performance between two different image acquisition devices: scanner and cell-phone camera. Whereas a flat-bed scanner offers higher quality distortion free imaging, a cell-phone camera trumps on the convenience and ease of use. The aim of this research is to quantify how the extra quality obtained from a scanner impacts the offline handwriting recognition. This was evaluated with two classification framework: a segmentation-free offline Bangla handwriting transcription with sequential detection of characters/diacritics [1] and a Bangla handwritten digit recognizer with an SVM classifier [2]. The Boise State Bangla Handwriting dataset is used for the experiments [3]. The highest recognition rate came when both training and testing on scanned images. The network trained with scanned images also exceeded the one trained with camera-acquired images in recognition of the camera acquired images, despite the mismatch in source.