Abstract

Abstract Handwritten character recognition falls under the domain of image classification, which has been under research for years. But still, specific gaps need to be highlighted as offline handwritten character recognition (OHCR) with the limitation of the unstructured hierarchy of character classification. However, the idea is to make the machine recognize handwritten human characters. The language focused on in this research paper is English, using offline handwritten character recognition for identifying English characters. There are many publicly available datasets, of which EMNIST is the most challenging. The key idea of this research paper is to recommend a deep learning-based ELBP-CNN method to help recognize English characters. This research paper proposes a deep learning CovNet with feature extraction and novel local binary pattern-based approaches, LBP (AND, OR), that is tested and compared with renowned pre-trained models using transfer learning. These parametric settings address multiple issues and are finalized after experimentation. The same hyperparametric settings were used for all the models under test and E-Character, with the same data augmentation settings. The proposed model, named the E-Character recognizer, produced 87.31% accuracy. It was better than most of the tested pre-trained models and other proposed methods by other researchers. This research paper further highlighted some problems, like misclassification due to the similar structure of characters.