Number Recognition Through Color Distortion Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Machine learning applied to image-based number recognition has made significant strides in recent years. Recent use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language search and generation of text have improved performance for general images, yet performance limitations still exist for data subsets related to color blindness. In this paper, we replicated the training of six distinct neural networks (MNIST, LeNet5, VGG16, AlexNet, and two AlexNet modifications) using deep learning techniques with the MNIST dataset and the Ishihara-Like MNIST dataset. While many prior works have dealt with MNIST, the Ishihara adaption addresses red-green combinations of color blindness, allowing for further research in color distortion. Through this research, we applied pre-processing to accentuate the effects of red-green and monochrome colorblindness and hyper-parameterized the existing architectures, ultimately achieving better overall performance than currently published in known works.