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Main Authors: Pant, Devesh, Talukder, Dibyendu, Kumar, Deepak, Pandey, Rachit, Seth, Aaditeshwar, Arora, Chetan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18948
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author Pant, Devesh
Talukder, Dibyendu
Kumar, Deepak
Pandey, Rachit
Seth, Aaditeshwar
Arora, Chetan
author_facet Pant, Devesh
Talukder, Dibyendu
Kumar, Deepak
Pandey, Rachit
Seth, Aaditeshwar
Arora, Chetan
contents Initiation, monitoring, and evaluation of development programmes can involve field-based data collection about project activities. This data collection through digital devices may not always be feasible though, for reasons such as unaffordability of smartphones and tablets by field-based cadre, or shortfalls in their training and capacity building. Paper-based data collection has been argued to be more appropriate in several contexts, with automated digitization of the paper forms through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) techniques. We contribute with providing a large dataset of handwritten digits, and deep learning based models and methods built using this data, that are effective in real-world environments. We demonstrate the deployment of these tools in the context of a maternal and child health and nutrition awareness project, which uses IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems to provide awareness information to rural women SHG (Self Help Group) members in north India. Paper forms were used to collect phone numbers of the SHG members at scale, which were digitized using the OCR tools developed by us, and used to push almost 4 million phone calls. The data, model, and code have been released in the open-source domain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_18948
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Use of Metric Learning for the Recognition of Handwritten Digits, and its Application to Increase the Outreach of Voice-based Communication Platforms
Pant, Devesh
Talukder, Dibyendu
Kumar, Deepak
Pandey, Rachit
Seth, Aaditeshwar
Arora, Chetan
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Initiation, monitoring, and evaluation of development programmes can involve field-based data collection about project activities. This data collection through digital devices may not always be feasible though, for reasons such as unaffordability of smartphones and tablets by field-based cadre, or shortfalls in their training and capacity building. Paper-based data collection has been argued to be more appropriate in several contexts, with automated digitization of the paper forms through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) techniques. We contribute with providing a large dataset of handwritten digits, and deep learning based models and methods built using this data, that are effective in real-world environments. We demonstrate the deployment of these tools in the context of a maternal and child health and nutrition awareness project, which uses IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems to provide awareness information to rural women SHG (Self Help Group) members in north India. Paper forms were used to collect phone numbers of the SHG members at scale, which were digitized using the OCR tools developed by us, and used to push almost 4 million phone calls. The data, model, and code have been released in the open-source domain.
title Use of Metric Learning for the Recognition of Handwritten Digits, and its Application to Increase the Outreach of Voice-based Communication Platforms
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18948