Dot Matrix OCR for Bottle Validity Inspection
Mircea Paul Muresan, Paul Andrei Szabo, Sergiu Nedevschi · 2019
Identifying expiration dates on water bottles for fast industrial processing of a large amount of products mainly affects water bottling factories, food warehouses and supermarkets. The impact of this problem is the distribution of expired bottles of water or their existence on the market. One of the key issues for automatic character readers from bottles is dotted text. Furthermore, the transparent and curved nature of the containing bottle in the presence of water increases the difficulty of the text extraction. An optical character recognition solution using a convolutional neural networks is proposed to solve this issue. The proposed solution segments the input image to extract the bottle, detects the text region of interest, then performs pre-processing operations and finally converts the characters extracted from the region of interest on the bottle in human-readable characters. The proposed solution has real time performance and it achieves high quality results on the evaluation set.