TL;DR
The Attention-Enhanced CNN-KAN (A-CNN-KAN), an innovative hybrid model that combines Convolutional Neural Networks for effective feature extraction, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for flexible non-linear pattern modeling, and a spatial attention mechanism to emphasize salient features, is presented.
This study focuses on enhancing handwritten Devanagari character recognition using deep learning models, specifically fine-tuned Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), combined with hybrid mathematical methods for image enhancement, proposing a fuzzy-enabled Power-Law transformation for image enhancement.
Offline handwritten word recognition has progressed from whole-word classification to sequence transcription, yet many systems depend on large annotated corpora and exploit lexical regularities over explicit character evidence. This paper presents an alternative formulation for Arabic offline handwritten word recognition, treating characters as spatial objects detected via a Faster Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network rather than symbols generated by a one-dimensional decoder. We construct and release a character-level annotated subset of 2153 handwritten word images from a standard Arabic benchmark, exporting matched detection, sequence, and word-class labels. We also introduce an open-source subword exchange toolkit that creates a controlled structural-generalization benchmark by swapping subwords while preserving handwriting style. Experiments compare the proposed detector against whole-word and sequence-based baselines on both the original held-out split and the perturbed benchmark. Results show sequence models degrade sharply under structural recombination, whereas the proposed detector remains stable, achieving a 26.56% character error rate and 70.0% word accuracy on the perturbed benchmark. These findings demonstrate that explicit character localization provides a robust, data-efficient alternative for Arabic handwritten text recognition in low-resource settings.
An edge-aware line-level HTR framework that extends a CNN-Transformer baseline with a learnable edge-extraction channel and Squeeze-and-Excitation channel attention and shows that combining learnable structural cues with channel-wise attention has improved robustness for degradation-prone historical manuscript collections.
A deep learning-based handwritten character recognition system that leverages Convolutional Neural Networks for automatic feature extraction and classification and highlights the effectiveness of deep learning techniques in enhancing recognition performance and reducing classification errors compared to conventional machine learning methods.
This article investigates offline recognition of handwritten Kazakh text in the Latin script using a convolutional recurrent neural network. The relevance of the study is determined by the transition of the Kazakh language to the Latin alphabet and the need to automate the processing of handwritten documents. The proposed model consists of a convolutional neural network feature extractor, two bidirectional long short-term memory layers, and a Connectionist Temporal Classification decoder. The convolutional layers extract visual features from word images, the bidirectional recurrent layers model the sequential relationships between characters, and CTC enables end-to-end training without explicit character-level segmentation. A specialized dataset named KazEsim, containing 20,000 handwritten Kazakh name images, was created and divided into writer-independent training, validation, and test subsets. Experimental results showed a character accuracy rate of 96.5% and a word accuracy rate of 92.3%. Compared with a conventional CNN baseline, the proposed CRNN model improved character accuracy by 6.1 percentage points and word accuracy by 9.2 percentage points. The proposed model also outperformed the fine-tuned TrOCR-small comparative baseline while requiring fewer parameters and lower inference latency. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of CNN–BiLSTM–CTC sequence modeling for offline recognition of handwritten Kazakh words in the Latin script.