Enhancing Bangla handwritten character recognition using Vision Transformers, VGG-16, and ResNet-50: a performance analysis

Bangla Handwritten Character Recognition (BHCR) remains challenging due to complex alphabets, and handwriting variations. In this study, we present a comparative evaluation of three deep learning architectures-Vision Transformer (ViT), VGG-16, and ResNet-50-on the CMATERdb 3.1.2 dataset comprising 24,000 images of 50 basic Bangla characters. Our work highlights the effectiveness of ViT in capturing global context and long-range dependencies, leading to improved generalization. Experimental results show that ViT achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 98.26%, outperforming VGG-16 (94.54%) and ResNet-50 (93.12%). We also analyze model behavior, discuss overfitting in CNNs, and provide insights into character-level misclassifications. This study demonstrates the potential of transformer-based architectures for robust BHCR and offers a benchmark for future research.