A two-stage system for meter value recognition

This paper describes a two-stage system for the recognition of postage meter values. A feed-forward neural abstraction pyramid is initialized in an unsupervised manner and trained in a supervised fashion to classify an entire digit block. It does not need prior digit segmentation. If the block recognition is not confident enough, a second stage tries to recognize single digits, taking into account the block classifier output for a neighboring digit as context. The system is evaluated on a large database. It can recognize meter values that are hard to read for humans.