# Amharic Alphabet Family Recognition Using Deep Learning
## 📌 Project Overview
This project focuses on recognizing **Amharic alphabetical family characters (ሀ to በ)** using deep learning techniques.
The goal is to build an end-to-end deep learning system starting from **custom data collection** to **model design, training, and evaluation**.
The system processes scanned handwritten worksheets containing a 10×7 grid of characters, automatically extracts individual character images, applies data augmentation, and trains a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify characters into 10 alphabet families. The trained model achieves **~98% accuracy** on the test set.
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## 🎯 Objectives
- Collect a **custom dataset** of Amharic alphabetical family characters (ሀ to በ)
- Extract characters from scanned worksheets using perspective transformation
- Preprocess and augment the dataset (6 variations per character)
- Design and train a **PyTorch CNN model** for character recognition
- Evaluate model performance using accuracy, confusion matrix, and loss curves
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## 🔠 Alphabet Classes
The project focuses on the following **10 Amharic alphabet family characters**:
- **ሀ** (ha)
- **ለ** (le)
- **ሐ** (hha)
- **መ** (me)
- **ሠ** (se)
- **ረ** (re)
- **ሰ** (sa)
- **ሸ** (sha)
- **ቀ** (qe)
- **በ** (be)
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## 📊 Dataset Collection
- The dataset was **collected manually** by scanning handwritten worksheets
- **80 scanned sheets** (JPG images) containing 10×7 grids of characters
- Each sheet contains 70 character cells (10 rows × 7 columns)
- Characters were written by multiple individuals to ensure diversity
- Images were captured using phone cameras and stored in `scanned_sheets/` directory
- No open-source or publicly available datasets were used
**Dataset Statistics:**
- Original scanned sheets: **80 images**
- Extracted character images (after augmentation): **~22,500 images**
- Training set: **~15,800 images** (70%)
- Validation set: **~3,300 images** (15%)
- Test set: ** …