How to OCR engraved text?

Question

I have this image

How to OCR it? I know this is very challenging, but I would

Answer 1

Machine learning (here, using some neutral network) for digits is usually accurate already with minimal training and easy to use.

One DIY approach:

1. The output from some neural net might be ???1160060060??1??? for the first character. From this you should pick the most commonly appearing (0).

2. To get the ordering of recognised digits right, use a "moving window", so as if you crop out a tiny part of the width of the image.

3. Repeat this over the whole width of the image.

The trickiest bit is quite likely about figuring out the space between one digit and the next.

If you're lucky the digits are always the same size (monispaced) and you can decide ahead of time how many pixels you need. Otherwise this can would normally be done in a calibration step before feeding pixels into the neural network.

If the image can be rotated it might actually make sense to have a separate neural network help you figure out the rotation.

Programmers (and me) tried out digit recognition already on Commodore computers in the 1980s! Nowadays, you might find some university AI courses that have tasks similar to this one.