Handwritten letter
classification of any given language has the potential to be used in
various fields such as literature, educational institutions,
digitization of government records etc. Bengali language with its
complex sets of mixed characters, poses significant complexities in
terms of automatic recognition of characters. In the Bengali character
set, there are over 360 distinct characters among which a lot of
similarities are present between different characters. Thus, the
classification of these characters gets harder as the recognition system
incorporates all these distinct characters. In recent years, a lot of
research has been done to solve this problem on isolated datasets with
significant results. Continuing the advancement in image processing, In
this paper, we have proposed a custom CNN model which has been trained
on Bangla Lekha Isolated dataset containing 1,66,106 images belong to 84
distinct classes with the capability to detect individual handwritten
Bengali letters including digits, vowels, consonants and compound
characters. Our proposed model was able to achieve 94.73% accuracy while
using less number of parameters compared to existing popular models