Ensemble deep learning model for optical character recognition

In modern deep learning, character recognition in images is a very important field of study due to its has many real life applications. The goal of this paper is to create the state-of-the-art character recognition model using a stacking ensemble of convolution neural networks (CNNs).To develop the proposed ensemble model, we evaluated several CNN models. The models were judged on how well they performed on the Chars74k dataset. The dataset contains 74,103 images divided into 62 classes with labels [A-Z], [a-z], and [0-9]. The accuracy distribution based on the dataset's subgroups (uppercase, lowercase, and digit) is shown in results. The proposed ensemble model achieves state-of-the-art performance with a maximum accuracy of 92.31% on complete dataset, 99.22% on Uppercase alphabets, 98.66% on Lowercase alphabets, 99.77% on Digits, 91.97% on Uppercase+Lowercase alphabets. On the complete and partial datasets, a comparison report between the proposed model and other existing approaches is also displayed. A comparative study of the proposed work and the previous methods is also shown in this paper, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed work.