BanglaWriting: A multi-purpose offline Bangla handwriting dataset

The BanglaWriting dataset contains single-page handwritings of 260 individuals of different personalities and ages. Each page includes bounding-boxes that bounds each word, along with the unicode representation of the writing. This dataset contains 21,234 words and 32,787 characters in total. Moreover, this dataset includes 5,470 unique words of Bangla vocabulary. Apart from the usual words, the dataset comprises 261 comprehensible overwriting and 450 incomprehensible overwriting. All of the bounding boxes and word labels are manually-generated. The dataset can be used for complex optical character/word recognition, writer identification, and handwritten word segmentation. Furthermore, this dataset is suitable for extracting age-based and gender-based variation of handwriting.