Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.

6 (2021), 5320-5326
Research Article

CNN based Digital alphanumeric archaeolinguistics apprehension for ancient script

detection

J.P.Premi a ,R.Madhumithab , N.R.Raajanc

a,b A student of Communication Systems, School of EEE, SASTRA Deemed to be University, Thanjavur.
c Senior Associate Professor, School of EEE, SASTRA Deemed to be University, Thanjavur

Article History: Received: 10 November 2020; Revised 12 January 2021 Accepted: 27 January 2021; Published
online: 5 April 2021
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Abstract: OCR is a most prominently used system in computer vision space. In the era of computer vision, the
recognitiontechnologies are indeed evolved but there are still some difficulties for computers when reading handwritten text
which can be resolved only after the introduction of machine learning. Recognition and verification of handwritten information
is still a challenging problem in machine learning. Optical Character Recognition is a process of recognizing text or
information present inside the images and converting it into a digital formatted text. Text recognition has immense applications
in the academics, research, commercial and industrial fields. This paper is about an Optical Character Recognition for text
recognition from the images which could be in any of the forms of handwritten text files as well as from the ancient manuscript
(Language-English). This paper presents a novel machine learning approach to recognize the characters using CNN and the
accuracy is found to be 73% approximately within a fraction of second. Later the recognized images are converted into the text
file and then get translated into the preferable languages.
Keywords: EMNIST datasets, Ancient manuscript, Neural network, Optical Character Recognition

1. Introduction
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and it refers to the technologies that help us to gather
information from our environment whether it is in typed, digitally printed or in the form of handwritten and
transform it into the digital text format. Once this was done then the digitally formatted text is easily search-able
and editable into various documents like PDF files, Word files, plain text files, database and presentation files.
Optical Character Recognition was originally developed to help visually impaired people and today it’s usage was
spread in various academic and industrial aspects. It was popularly used to gather data from ID’s and passports,
utility meters, promotional codes, serial number of any kind, automatic cartography, signature verification and
identification and in automatic number-plate readers. Optical Character Recognition is employed when the
information should be readable by both humans and to machines. As compared with other techniques of automatic
detection and data capturing like Radio Frequency Identification, Bio-metrics, Magnetic stripes, voice recognition
and smart cards, Optical Character Recognition is unique because it only takes fraction of second to get the
required data, low system complexity and it eliminates the human error. OCR deals with the recognition of
optically processed characters. OCR can be performed in two ways i.e., off-line and on-line. Off-line recognition
was done when the writing or printing was completed whereas in on-line recognition the computer recognizes the
characters when they are drawn. The paper deals with off-line handwritten text recognition as it is comparatively
difficult, as each individual has a unique handwritten styles which is in different font, frequent change in style and
sizes of the characters, overlapping between the letters and even due to incorrect meaning of the text, which brings
the recognition system at risk. Character detection, recognition and feature extraction from the ancient manuscript
was highly difficult task for the researchers due to various problems like quality degradation due to aging and
climatic conditions, background images. So there is a need to preserve the valuable literatures in order to acquire
knowledge for future generations. In this motive, the paper presents a machine recognition system that recognizes
the characters from the text files and from the ancient manuscript images available in a palm leaf literature format.
One of the major reason for poor character recognition was due to poor character segmentation. The proposed
approach has better segmentation process by adaptive threshold value, noise level reduction, compute space
vectors, binarization, bounding box analysis and perform pixel optimization. The proposed approach uses a
Convolutional Neural Network trained with an E-MNIST dataset and character level recognition was done by
Selection Auto Encoder Decoder (SAED) technique.
2. Significance of The Study
Before computers existed all the information was stored in written form, this is very inefficient form of storage
as the paper information cannot be stored for very long time and can get lost or be destroyed. On the
contrary, information on computer is stored safely for long time and multiple copies of same information can
be made easily. Thus after inventing the computers lot of money was wasted in manual labor for converting this

5320
 Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.6 (2021), 5320-5326
Research Article

paper information into digital information. Instead machine learning can be used to identify and convert this paper
information into digital information without human intervention or manual labor. This project is just an
introduction to this approach.
3. Review of Related Studies
Enormous research work was done in this area and some of them are mentioned here.
Chirag Patel proposed a case study for the OCR by Open Source OCR Tool [1], which gives an
introductionto open source OCR tool Tesseract and provides a comparative experimental analysis2 of this OCR
tool and Transym tool by taking car license as an input and various parameters are analysed. Isaac Wu and
Hsiao-ChenChang presented a scheme that specifically used for signboard recognition by text recognition [2],
this uses SIFTfeature matching method with traditional OCR to increase the success rate of recognition. B.Gatos
andD.Karras proposed a rigorous non-linear method to solve large-scale OCR problems[3], by using typeset
Greekcharacters and analysed the better performance as compared with other neural networks like Artificial
Neural Networks. This non-linear method estimates the class discrimination ability of continuous valued features.
It found to have high recognition performance in some real time applications. Sang Sung Park, Won Gyo Jung
they constructed an OCR system using Artificial Neural Network and Back Propagation (BP) algorithm [4] to
store the extracted characters automatically as a Database and can be easily used whenever necessary. The Method
proposed in [5] was done in two stages, in which first phase neural network is used for recognition of isolated
characters and in second phase for recognition of word and characters of variable length employing RNN and
CNN integrated approach.
The remaining sections of the paper is structured as follows: Section II gives objectives of the study; Section
III proceed with the concepts of materials and the algorithm employed; Section IV shows the experimental
results and detailed analysis; the final section provides conclusion.
4. Objectives of The Study
• To provide a higher accuracy model and faster computational method for recognition of the handwritten
characters
• to evaluate the network performances like accuracy, threshold value
• to implement this model in real time applications like ancient script recognition (here in English
language) from palm leaf image
• to expand this model for optical character recognition
5. Materials And Methodology
Neural computing is a new method in computer vision where the design of components is less well specified
than other architecture. In this machine learning project, the convolutional neural network will recognize the
characters, here the English alphabets from A-Z including both uppercase and lowercase and special characters
like spaces even when found between the words of handwritten text and the character level segmentation and
recognition was done for the ancient English literature manuscript written on palm leaf. This proposed system it
will effectively recognize the characters using Convolutional Neural Network in Matlab software.

5321
 Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.6 (2021), 5320-5326
Research Article

Fig no:1 Block diagram for Character recognition system

A. Data acquisition:
EMNIST stands for Extended Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology. The NIST
Database_19 consists of handwritten digits and characters collected from around 500 writing sources. It was
organized into six classes like Balanced Dataset, By-Class, By-Merge, Letter dataset, Digits Dataset and EMNIST
MNIST Datasets. Here, only By-Class and By-Merge datasets are used. In the original NIST Special Database-19
consisting of a 731,668 training data and 82,587 testing data. The By-Class dataset holds 62 classes comprises of
10 digit classes, 26 lowercase alphabets classes, and 26 uppercase alphabets classes.

Fig no:2 Character level and line level text from an Ancient English language manuscript

5322
 Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.6 (2021), 5320-5326
Research Article

Methodology:
Image Pre-processing:
Pre-processing was done to make the OCR system easily analyse and process the data. Here the input image
which is RGB is converted into the binary scale (pixel value of 0 and 1) image followed by the noise removal. For
the recognition of characters, the input image of size 28*28 is pre-processed using Convolutional Auto Encoder
(CAE) to do binarization that encloses of an activation functions. In this
binary images, the characters are represented with the binary value 1 and the background has the binary value
0. Pixel normalization3 was done and the binary image get transformed into another binary image and store the
detected word in a matrix form. Adaptive threshold was employed to map label to neighbouring pixel. A threshold
can be calculated an algorithm as shown below.
a) Local extrema s(t) was calculated
b) Local maxima lmax(t) and Local minima lmin(t) was generated
c) Find the mean value (M) of lmax(t) and lmin(t)
d) Threshold function is given as:
T=M+K.sd
K is the tuning parameter and sd is a value standard deviation. Here the threshold value was found to be 0.44
in approx. Selection Auto Encoder Decoder(SAED) is used for binarization process. The experiment was done
with 73% accuracy with a binarization time of 5 seconds.
Then the segmentation was done so that image becomes more meaningful and can be easily understood. In
segmentation properties of image like position, edge colour, line width was detected. Then the space vectors are
initialized to compute the total space between the adjacent characters. This method carves a path and the path with
minimal energy is chosen.
Training and recognition:
After segmentation, the recognition was done by the three layers of CNN. This proposed approach employs
convolutional layer, max pooling layer and dropout layer, flatten layer and dense layer. The image is firstly passed
into a convolutional layer for two times which apply certain extracted features on the filter. The max pooling layer
was used to reduce the spatial size of given image which further transferred into a dropout layer which prevents
overfitting.
Table 1: summary of processing layers used:

6. Result and conclusion

The CNN was used for the recognition of the characters and obtained the accuracy of 73% (approx.)
=( / )∗100
Where, Ar -recognition accuracy
Nr - recognized images
Nt - total number of images used. After the completion of recognition process

5323
Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.6 (2021), 5320-5326
Research Article

Fig no:3 Input image of handwritten text

Fig no:4 Binarized image

Fig no:6 Detected handwritten text

Fig no:5 Segmented characters are stored as an separate image

Fig no:7 Text from an Ancient English literature manuscript present in a palm leaf in degraded format

5324
 Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.6 (2021), 5320-5326
Research Article

Fig no:8 Binarization done by Using Selection Encoder Decoder Technique and the Segmentation Using Seam
Carbel Approach

Fig.8 Recognized characters are converted into text file

7. Conclusion
There are many languages found across the world each of them has different handwriting styles which can be
recognized by this OCR system using CNN with higher recognition rate. Also here, character level recognition
system is proposed for English text written on palm leaf. The ancient script shown here was in degraded format,
which should be preserved and deciphered into text format for future generation. This proposed approach has very
low wrong recognition accuracy but has high speed of performance. Performing with proper pre-processing tasks
and valid database will leads to the successful detection of English alphabets and numerals from the images with
better efficiency. This work can be further extended to multilingual ancient scripts recognition system and also
with various form of documented data as front end. It can be used in Passport checking, Postal address
verification, academic and industrial applications.
References
1. Chirag Patel, Atul Patel, Dharmendra Patel, “Optical Character Recognition by Open Source OCR Tool
Tesseract: A Case Study,” International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887), Volume 55–
No.10, October 2012.
2. Isaac Wu and Hsiao-Chen Chang, Signboard Optical Character Recognition.
3. B.Gatos, D.Karras and S.Perantonis, “Optical Character Recognition Using Novel Feature Extraction &
Neural Network Classification Tech□niques,” in IEEE, 1994.
4. Sang Sung Park, Won Gyo Jung, Young Geun Shin, Dong-Sik Jang, “Optical Character Recognition
System Using BP Algorithm,” IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security,
VOL.8 No.12, December 2008.
5. H. Meng and D. Morariu, “Khmer character recognition using artificial neural network,” 2014 Asia-
Pacific Signal Inf. Process. Assoc. Annu. Summit Conf. APSIPA 2014, 2014,
doi:10.1109/APSIPA.2014.7041824.
6. K. Cho et al., “Learning phrase representations using RNN encoder-decoder for statistical machine
translation,” EMNLP 2014 - 2014 Conf. Empir. Methods Nat. Lang. Process. Proc. Conf., pp. 1724–
1734, 2014, doi: 10.3115/v1/d14-1179.

5325
Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.6 (2021), 5320-5326
Research Article

7. Batuhan Balci, Dan Saadati, Dan Shiferaw, “Handwritten Text Recognition using Deep Learning,”,
unpublished. Yi-Chao Wua, Fei Yina, Cheng-Lin Liu, “Improving handwritten Chinese text recognition
using neural network language models and convolutional neural network shape models,”,in Elsevier, 29
December 2016.
8. Raghuraj Singh, C.S.Yadav, Prabhat Verma, Vibhash Yadav, ‘Optical Character Recognition Using
Novel Feature Extraction & Neural Network Classification Techniques,”, International Journal of
Computer Science & CommunicationVol. 1, No. 1, January-June 2010, pp. 91-95.
9. F. Hussain and J. Je ong, Efficient deep neural network for digital image compression employing
rectified linear neurons, Journal of Sensors, 2016, pp. 1-7.
10. IJ. Tsang, IR. Tsang and DV Dyck 1998. Handwritten character recognition based on moment features
derived from image partition. In Int. Conf. image processing, vol. 2, 939– 942.
11. M. Shi, Y. Fujisawa, T. Wakabayashi and F. Kimura 2002. Handwritten numeral recognition using
gradient and curvature of gray scale image. Pattern Recognition, vol. 35, no. 10, 2051–2059.

5326