Trace Transform Feature Learning for Offline Jawi Handwritten Recognition

Offline Jawi handwritten recognition is very important to allow efficient archiving and retrieving the original documents and increase the availability of the content. It is challenging task and still considered an open problem because the state-of-the-art recognizer performance is considered sub-par. The tradition trace Transform features extractor has potential, however the complexity of parameters tuning in feature engineered approach combine with independent non-learnable sub-word classifier produce sub-par Jawi sub-word recognition accuracy. The proposed trace Transform feature learning address the features extraction complexity by automatically discovers the features according to data. The features extractor and classifier trained end-to-end from raw input data to target class to find the optimum parameters. The trace transform process defined as layer similar with convolution process in Convolution Neural Network. This approach improves data representation and produce better Jawi handwritten recognition performance. trace Transform feature learning are more robust to Affine Transformations compared to the state-of-the-arts Convolution Neural Networks feature learning because its data representation invariant to rotation, slanting and skewing. This proposed feature learning performance evaluated with its performance in sub-word recognition performance using Jawi dataset. In this paper only single layer of trace transform feature learning compare with traditional trace transform feature and Convolution Neural network as the state-of-the-art feature learning. The performances are significantly better compared to traditional trace transform feature and able to compete with convolution neural network in single layer, three layers and comparable with eight layers.