Convolutional Neural Networks for Handwritten Javanese Character Recognition

Convolutional neural network (CNN) is state-of-the-art method in object recognition task. Specialized for spatial input data type, CNN has special convolutional and pooling layers which enable hierarchical feature learning from the input space. For offline handwritten character recognition problem such as classifying character in MNIST database, CNN shows better classification result than any other methods. By leveraging the advantages of CNN over character recognition task, in this paper we developed a software which utilizes digital image processing methods and CNN module for offline handwritten Javanese character recognition. The software performs image segmentation process using contour and Canny edge detection with OpenCV library over captured handwritten Javanese character image. CNN will classify the segmented image into 20 classes of Javanese letters. For evaluation purposes, we compared CNN to multilayer perceptron (MLP) on classification accuracy and training time. Experiment results show that CNN model testing accuracy outperforms MLP accuracy although CNN needs more training time than MLP