BanglaWriting: A multi-purpose offline Bangla handwriting dataset

M F Mridha; Abu Quwsar Ohi; M Ameer Ali; Mazedul Islam Emon; Muhammad Mohsin Kabir

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2020.106633

BanglaWriting: A multi-purpose offline Bangla handwriting dataset

Data Brief. 2020 Dec 9:34:106633. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2020.106633. eCollection 2021 Feb.

Authors

M F Mridha¹, Abu Quwsar Ohi¹, M Ameer Ali¹, Mazedul Islam Emon¹, Muhammad Mohsin Kabir¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Bangladesh University of Business & Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Abstract

This article presents a Bangla handwriting dataset named BanglaWriting that contains single-page handwritings of 260 individuals of different personalities and ages. Each page includes bounding-boxes that bounds each word, along with the unicode representation of the writing. This dataset contains 21,234 words and 32,787 characters in total. Moreover, this dataset includes 5,470 unique words of Bangla vocabulary. Apart from the usual words, the dataset comprises 261 comprehensible overwriting and 450 handwritten strikes and mistakes. All of the bounding-boxes and word labels are manually-generated. The dataset can be used for complex optical character/word recognition, writer identification, handwritten word segmentation, and word generation. Furthermore, this dataset is suitable for extracting age-based and gender-based variation of handwriting.

Keywords: Optical character recognition; Optical word recognition; Word segmentation; Writer identification.