Character Recognition in Natural Images Utilising TensorFlow

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are commonly used for character recognition. They achieve the lowest error rates for popular datasets such as SVHN and MNIST. Usage of CNN is lacking in research about character classification in natural images regarding the whole English alphabet. This thesis conducts an experiment where TensorFlow is used to construct a CNN that is trained and tested on the Chars74K dataset, with 15 images per class for training and 15 images per class for testing. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher accuracy than the non-CNN approach by de Campos et al. [1], that achieved 55.26%. The thesis explores data augmentation techniques for expanding the small training set and evaluates the result of applying rotation, stretching, translation and noise-adding. The result of this is that all of these methods apart from adding noise gives a positive effect on the accuracy of the network. Furthermore, the experiment shows that with a three layered convolutional neural network it is possible to create a character classifier that is as good as de Campos et al.'s. It is believed that even better results can be achieved if more experiments would be conducted on the parameters of the network and the augmentation.