Recognition of Handwritten Digit using Convolutional Neural Network in Python with Tensorflow and Comparison of Performance for Various Hidden Layers

Abstract: In recent times, with the increase of Artificial Neural Network (ANN), deep learning has brought a dramatic twist in the field of machine learning by making it more artificially intelligent. Deep learning is remarkably used in vast ranges of fields because of its diverse range of applications such as surveillance, health, medicine, sports, robotics, drones, etc. In deep learning, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is at the center of spectacular advances that mixes Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and up to date deep learning strategies. It has been used broadly in pattern recognition, sentence classification, speech recognition, face recognition, text categorization, document analysis, scene, and handwritten digit recognition. The goal of this paper is to observe the variation of accuracies of CNN to classify handwritten digits using various numbers of hidden layers and epochs and to make the comparison between the accuracies. For this performance evaluation of CNN, we performed our experiment using Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) dataset. Further, the network is trained using stochastic gradient descent and the backpropagation algorithm.