A hybrid convolutional neural network and support vector machine classifier for Amharic character recognition

Optical character recognition is a way of converting scanned images of printed or handwritten documents into machine-encoded text, making it easier to store, browse, retrieve, and process electronic data. In this research, a Printed Amharic Characters Recognition dataset is prepared to train and test a model. Images in the dataset only contain 231 basic Amharic characters that are normalized to 32 × 32 pixels. In this work, a hybrid model of the two super classifiers is developed: the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the support vector machine (SVM). In this novel hybrid CNN-SVM model, CNN works as an automatic feature extractor from the raw images, and then, the extracted feature vectors are given as input to SVM for classification and recognition. A 99.84% accuracy was achieved on the own-prepared dataset and 95.59% accuracy on the benchmark Amharic Optical Character Recognition Database in classifying the testing dataset images. The proposed hybrid CNN-SVM model gave better results than the CNN with a fully connected layer. Moreover, the proposed model outperforms previously existing works attempted by others to recognize printed Amharic characters on the same and different datasets.