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 Artificial Intelligence (AI). Deep learning is used 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 layer 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.

Machine learning is a fundamental aspect of artificial intelligence that involves the development of algorithms and models that allow computers to learn and make predictions or decisions without explicit programming. With the development of neural networks, back-propagation algorithms and deep learning, machine learning has made breakthroughs in the fields of image recognition, natural language processing and handwriting recognition using machine learning techniques. The advent of deep learning has revolutionized the field of handwriting recognition, using convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and sequence-to-sequence models to provide solutions that go beyond machine learning methods and significantly improve the accuracy and robustness of handwriting recognition systems. But challenges remain, including the need for large labelled datasets, computational resources and addressing potential biases. As research in deep learning techniques continues to drive handwriting recognition closer towards realisability, machine learning approaches remain at the forefront.

The automated transcription of handwritten characters into a legible output is a multi-faceted process with diverse applications. In this paper, a novel approach to optical character recognition (OCR) for handwritten digits is proposed that, in certain components, exceeds current architectures in terms of accuracy, effectiveness, adjustability, temporal efficiency, and/or computational simplicity. This model succeeds in the adoption and enhancement of deprecated or obsolete algorithms across eight steps of image pre-processing—normalization, grayscaling, thresholding/binarization, noise removal, skew-correction, skeletonization/thinning, line separation, and character segmentation. The aforementioned model is evaluated with the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) leveraging the Balanced eMNIST dataset for training and testing. By suggesting contour-based feature extraction methods as alternatives to pixel-by-pixel iteration, the proposed paradigm demonstrates its capacity to serve as a suitable alternative to current, commonly used algorithms and computational techniques for textual image classification.