Devanagari Handwritten Character Recognition using Transfer Learning with Deep CNN and SVM

This paper proposes how Transfer Learning can be utilized in recognition of handwritten Devanagari characters. A Deep Convolution Neural Network (Deep CNN) is used for features extraction and classification, whereas Deep CNN with Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as a concept of Transfer Learning, where the features extracted by the Deep CNN are fed to SVM. Experiments conducted on real-world dataset show that the proposed approach not only achieved 99.413% accuracy on test set but also reduced the number of parameters used for classification.