Variational Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Recognition of Bai Characters

Abstract

When talking about Bai nationality, people are impressed by its long history and the language it has created. However, since fewer people of the young generation learn the traditional language, the glorious Bai culture becomes less known, making understanding Bai characters difficult. Based on the highly precise character recognition model for Bai characters, the paper is aimed at helping people read books written in Bai characters so as to popularize the culture. To begin with, a data set is built with the support of Bai culture fans and experts. However, the data set is not large enough as knowledge in this respect is limited. This makes the deep learning model less accurate since it lacks sufficient data. The popular zero-shot learning (ZSL) is adopted to overcome the insufficiency of data sets. We use Chinese characters as the seen class, Bai characters as the unseen class, and the number of strokes as the attribute to construct the ZSL format data set. However, the existing ZSL methods ignore the character structure information, so a generation method based on variational autoencoder (VAE) is put forward, which can automatically capture the character structure information. Experimental results show that the method facilitates the recognition of Bai characters and makes it more precise.