Handwritten Hiragana Letter Detection Using CNN

Hiragana is one of the primary alphabets used in Japanese. Hiragana is a phonetic symbol; each letter represents one syllable. Hiragana letters are formed from curved lines and strokes. However, detecting Hiragana letters causes many errors because people still rely on their vision to detect the letters, especially people familiar with them for the first time. It will be difficult and not very clear to read the letters. Therefore, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) method is used to detect handwritten Hiragana letters and help people who first get to know Hiragana letters when the letters are too complicated for human eyes to detect. This research uses the YOLOv8 model as a handwritten Hiragana letter detection algorithm. The Hiragana letters to be detected are basic letters with 46 characters. This research uses the YOLOv8 model run on Google Collaboratory with the Ultralytics library version 8.0.20 using the Python programming language. The dataset is collected from the internet and annotated using the Roboflow framework and dataset 4600 Hiragana letters. From the test results, the best model is YOLOv8l using SGD optimizer and learning rate 0.01 with a precision value of 98.5%, recall value of 95.7%, f1-score value of 97.1%, and mAP value of 95.5%. In the future, we aim to expand the number of datasets and employ a broader range of hyperparameter values to optimize the classification precision and accuracy of the Hiragana Letter Detection system.