Isolated Handwritten Farsi Numerals Recognition Using Sparse and Over-Complete Representations

A new isolated handwritten Farsi numeral recognition algorithm is proposed in this paper, which exploits the sparse and over-complete structure from the handwritten Farsi numeral data. In this research, the sparse structure is represented as an over-complete dictionary, which is learned by the K-SVD algorithm. These atoms in this dictionary are adopted to initialize the first layer of the convolutional neural network (CNN), the latter is then trained to do the classification task. Data distortion techniques are also applied to promote the generalization capability of the trained classifier. Experiments have shown that good results have been achieved in CENPARMI handwritten Farsi numeral database.