Handwritten Digit Recognition of MNIST dataset using Deep Learning state-of-the-art Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)

Handwritten digit recognition is an intricate assignment that is vital for developing applications, in computer vision digit recognition is one of the major applications. There has been a copious exploration done in the Handwritten Character Recognition utilizing different deep learning models. Deep learning is rapidly increasing in demand due to its resemblance to the human brain. The two major Deep learning algorithms Artificial Neural Network and Convolutional Neural Network which have been compared in this paper considering their feature extraction and classification stages of recognition. The models were trained using categorical cross-entropy loss and ADAM optimizer on the MNIST dataset. Backpropagation along with Gradient Descent is being used to train the networks along with reLU activations in the network which do automatic feature extraction. In neural networks, Convolution Neural Network (ConvNets or Convolutional neural networks) is one of the primary classifiers to do image recognition, image classification tasks in Computer Vision.