Title of Submission
Offline Bangla Handwriting Recognition with Sequential Detection of Characters/Diacritics
Degree Program
Electrical and Computer Engineering, PhD
Major Advisor Name
Elisa Barney Smith
Type of Submission
Scholarly Poster
Abstract
This presents an offline handwriting recognizer for Bangla script. In spite of being a major script, very little progress has been made in this field for Bangla. Here, we present a handwriting recognition unit with sequential detection of characters/diacritics. A faster R-CNN was used to spot the graphemes from word images and the results were merged to form a transcription. Transfer learning and data augmentation techniques were applied to increase the speed and accuracy of the process. We achieved a WER and CER of 21.5% and 8.9% respectively, which is the first reported transcription result for Bangla script.