Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Handwritten Characters Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Assist in Exam Reader System

This work aimed to develop a character recognition method to facilitate the correction of answer cards in the Multiprova software through the development of a response card analysis flow that would culminate in the recognition of letters written by students and automatic correction of the tests. To isolate and identify the answers written on the answer cards, image segmentation techniques were used based on fixed marks printed on the cards. To recognize the letters and numbers written on the cards, trained three convolutional neural networks (for digits, letters and true or false). The results achieved (98.84% accuracy for digit CNN, 98.38% accuracy for letter CNN and 99.89% accuracy for true or false CNN) point out a great average success rate.