  In spite of advances in object recognition technology, Handwritten Bangla
Character Recognition (HBCR) remains largely unsolved due to the presence of
many ambiguous handwritten characters and excessively cursive Bangla
handwritings. Even the best existing recognizers do not lead to satisfactory
performance for practical applications related to Bangla character recognition
and have much lower performance than those developed for English alpha-numeric
characters. To improve the performance of HBCR, we herein present the
application of the state-of-the-art Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN)
including VGG Network, All Convolution Network (All-Conv Net), Network in
Network (NiN), Residual Network, FractalNet, and DenseNet for HBCR. The deep
learning approaches have the advantage of extracting and using feature
information, improving the recognition of 2D shapes with a high degree of
invariance to translation, scaling and other distortions. We systematically
evaluated the performance of DCNN models on publicly available Bangla
handwritten character dataset called CMATERdb and achieved the superior
recognition accuracy when using DCNN models. This improvement would help in
building an automatic HBCR system for practical applications.
