Enhancing Marathi Handwritten Character Recognition Using Ensemble Learning

In the current era, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model plays a vital role in converting images of handwritten characters or words into text editable script. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students' performance is assessed based on multiple-choice questions and handwritten answers so, in this situation, the need for handwritten recognition has become acute. Handwritten answers in any regional language need the OCR model to transform the readable machine-encoded text for automatic assessment which will reduce the burden of manual assessment. The single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm recognizes the handwritten characters but its accuracy is suppressed when dataset volume is increased. In proposed work stacking and soft voting ensemble mechanisms that address multiple CNN models to recognize the handwritten characters. The performance of the ensemble mechanism is significantly better than the single CNN model. This proposed work ensemble VGG16, Alexnet and LeNet-5 as base classifiers using stacking and soft voting ensemble approaches. The overall accuracy of the proposed work is 98.66% when the soft voting ensemble has three CNN classifiers.