Old English Character Recognition Using Neural Networks

Author

Sattajit Sutradhar, Georgia Southern UniversityFollow

Term of Award

Summer 2018

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mathematics (M.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Committee Chair

Ionut Emil Iacob

Committee Member 1

Zhan Chen

Committee Member 2

Marcel Ilie

Committee Member 3

Kevin Kiernan

Abstract

Character recognition has been capturing the interest of researchers since the beginning of the twentieth century. While the Optical Character Recognition for printed material is very robust and widespread nowadays, the recognition of handwritten materials lags behind. In our digital era more and more historical, handwritten documents are digitized and made available to the general public. However, these digital copies of handwritten materials lack the automatic content recognition feature of their printed materials counterparts. We are proposing a practical, accurate, and computationally efficient method for Old English character recognition from manuscript images. Our method relies on a modern machine learning model, Artificial Neural Networks, to perform character recognition based on individual character images cropped directly from the images of the manuscript pages. We propose model dimensionality reduction methods that improve accuracy and computational effectiveness. Our experimental results show that the model we propose outperforms current automatic text recognition techniques.

Recommended Citation

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Research Data and Supplementary Material

No