Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Knowledge Distillation for Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition

Deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs) have achieved outstanding performance in this field. Meanwhile, handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) is a challenging area of research in the field of computer vision. DNNs require a large number of parameters and high memory consumption. To address these issues, this paper proposes an approach based on an attention mechanism and knowledge distillation. The attention mechanism improves the feature extraction and the knowledge distillation reduces the number of parameters. The experimental results show that ResNet18 achieves a recognition accuracy of 97.63% on the HCCR dataset with 11.25 million parameters. Compared with other methods, this study improves the performance for HCCR.