Isolated Bangla handwritten character recognition with convolutional neural network

The handwritten character recognition (HCR) problem has been studied extensively during the last few decades with varying level of success. Although one of the earliest optical character recognition work was done using an artificial neural network, due to low computational speed and other computational resource constraints, researchers had to move away to formulate the HCR problem of different languages (including Bangla) using the hand crafted features based classification methods. The recent progress of deep learning technologies and significant developments of parallel computing hardware have established a solid platform for the researchers in producing state-of-the-art reliable performance in many fields. Even though deep learning is proving its applicability in different computer vision problems since AlexNet was proposed in 2012, due to…