Detonator coded character spotting based on convolutional neural networks

To facilitate the management of detonators, an automatic spotting system is proposed for detonator coded characters based on convolutional neural networks. The system contains a multi-scale detection network, a multi-label recognition network and a post-processing layer. An improved fully convolution network (FCN) is designed as the multi-scale detection network to obtain the accurate response map of the detonator image. Two subnetworks are parallel integrated into the FCN to perform a coarse-to-fine detection. An improved Jaccard loss function with a regularization term is defined to train the FCN. The region of interest (ROI) of the detonator image is achieved when the response map is post-processed by the post-processing layer. Finally, a modified multi-label network is used to recognize the detonator coded characters in the ROI. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system achieves a better spotting performance for detonator coded characters than the state-of-the-art text spotting methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency.