Deep learning-based digitization of Kurdish text handwritten in the e-government system

Abstract

Many government institutions in developing countries such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) keep a variety of paper-based records that are available in printed or handwritten format. The need for technology that turns handwritten writing into digital text is therefore highly demanded. E-government in developed and developing countries is a crucial facilitator for the provision of such services. This paper aims to develop a deep learning model based on the mask region convolutional neural network (mask-RCNN) to effectively digitize kurdish handwritten text recognition (KHTR). In this research, typical datasets, which includes the isolated handwritten Central Kurdish character images, an extensive database of 40,410 images, and 390 native writers have been produced to determine the developed approach’s performance in terms of identification rates. This approach achieves adequate outcomes in terms of training time and accuracy. The proposed model gives higher performance for detection, localization, and recognition when using a dataset containing many challenges, the results were 80%, 96%, and 87.6 for precision, recall, and F-score respectively. The findings revealed that the proposed model obtained better results compared to other similar works. The accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) is more than 99%.