Automatic generation of annotated datasets for industrial OCR

Machine learning algorithms need a lot of data, both for training and for testing. However, not always appropriate data are in fact available. This document presents the work that has been carried out at Datalogic USA’s laboratories in Eugene, Oregon, USA, to create data for industrial Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applications. It describes the automatic sys- tem that has been built. The images are created by printing and capturing strings of a variable layout, and they are ground truthed in a later stage, in an automatic way. Two datasets are generated, of which one is employed to asses a network’s performance.