Self-Adaptive Hybridized Lion Optimization Algorithm With Transfer Learning for Ancient Tamil Character Recognition in Stone Inscriptions

Tamil character recognition serves as a vital research problem in pattern recognition since there are many serious technical difficulties due to similarity and complexity of characters when compared with other languages. Stone inscriptions reveal details of luxury, lifestyle, economic status, cultural practices, administrative tasks followed by various rulers and dynasties of Tamil Nadu. Since ancient stone inscriptions are in existence for a longer period, there are possibilities of natural erosion and no early protection measures are available. The ancient stone inscriptions are always not complete which creates many difficulties in reading and understanding them and their aesthetic appreciation. There is a difficulty in recognizing Tamil characters mainly because of the characters with a number of holes, loops and curves. The number of letters in Tamil language is higher when compared to other languages. Even though there are various approaches provided by the researchers, challenges and issues still prevail in recognition of tamil text in stone inscriptions. In the existing systems, detection algorithms fail to produce desired accuracy and hence stone inscription recognition using transfer learning, a promising method is proposed here. Lion Optimization Algorithm (LOA) is applied to optimize brightness and contrast and then stone inscription images are pre-processed for noise removal and then each character is separated by identifying contours. Characters are recognized using Transfer Learning (TL), a Deep Convolution Neural Network-based multi classification approach. The proposed hybrid model Self-Adaptive Lion Optimization Algorithm with Transfer Learning (SLOA-TL) when implemented in images of stone inscriptions achieves better accuracy and speed than other existing methods. It serves as an efficient design for recognition of tamil characters in stone inscriptions and preserving tamil traditional knowledge.