Pearson Correlation-Based Feature Selection for Document Classification Using Balanced Training

Documents are stored in a digital form across several organizations. Printing this amount of data and placing it into folders instead of storing digitally is against the practical, economical, and ecological perspective. An efficient way of retrieving data from digitally stored documents is also required. This article presents a real-time supervised learning technique for document classification based on deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), which aims to reduce the impact of adverse document image issues such as signatures, marks, logo, and handwritten notes. The proposed technique's major steps include data augmentation, feature extraction using pre-trained neural network models, feature fusion, and feature selection. We propose a novel data augmentation technique, which normalizes the imbalanced dataset using the secondary dataset RVL-CDIP. The DCNN features are extracted using the VGG19 and AlexNet networks. The extracted features are fused, and the fused feature vector is optimized by applying a Pearson correlation coefficient-based technique to select the optimized features while removing the redundant features. The proposed technique is tested on the Tobacco3482 dataset, which gives a classification accuracy of 93.1% using a cubic support vector machine classifier, proving the validity of the proposed technique.