Variations of AlexNet and GoogLeNet to Improve Korean Character Recognition Performance

Abstract

Deep learning using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is being studied in various fields of image recognition and these studies show excellent performance. In this paper, we compare the performance of CNN architectures, KCR-AlexNet and KCR-GoogLeNet. The experimental data used in this paper is obtained from PHD08, a large-scale Korean character database. It has 2,187 samples of each Korean character with 2,350 Korean character classes for a total of 5,139,450 data samples. In the training results, KCR-AlexNet showed an accuracy of over 98% for the top-1 test and KCR-GoogLeNet showed an accuracy of over 99% for the top-1 test after the final training iteration. We made an additional Korean character dataset with fonts that were not in PHD08 to compare the classification success rate with commercial optical character recognition (OCR) programs and ensure the objectivity of the experiment. While the commercial OCR programs showed 66.95% to 83.16% classification success rates, KCR-AlexNet and KCR-GoogLeNet showed average classification success rates of 90.12% and 89.14%, respectively, which are higher than the commercial OCR programs' rates. Considering the time factor, KCR-AlexNet was faster than KCR-GoogLeNet when they were trained using PHD08; otherwise, KCR-GoogLeNet had a faster classification speed.