Recognition of Online Turkish Handwriting using Transfer Learning

We present a recognition system for online Turkish handwriting using transfer learning. Training deep networks requires large amounts of data. Since such a sufficiently large collection of Turkish handwriting samples is not available, So we adopt the transfer learning approach and train and optimize a CNN-BLSTM recognition system first using the standard IAM-On dataset of English handwriting. Then, we fine tune it with Turkish handwriting samples from a smaller dataset. Fine tuning increases the character recognition rate of the final system which is evaluated on 2,041 samples of isolated Turkish words from the initial value of 49% to 85%. The results show that transfer learning can be a solution to the data scarcity problem of online Turkish handwriting.