Persian handwritten digit recognition by random forest and convolutional neural networks

Persian handwritten digit recognition has attracted some interests in the research community by introduction of large Hoda dataset. In this paper, the well-known random forest (RF) and convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms are investigated for Persian handwritten digit recognition on the Hoda dataset. Using the Hoda dataset as a standard testbed, we have performed some experiments with different preprocessing steps, feature types, and baselines. It is then shown that RFs and CNNs perform competitively with the state-of-the-art methods on this dataset, while CNNs being the fastest if appropriate hardware is available.