Building Custom Deep Learning Based OCR models

OCR provides us with different ways to see an image, find and recognize the text in it. When we think about OCR, we inevitably think of lots of paperwork - bank cheques and legal documents, ID cards and street signs. In this blog post, we will try to predict the text present in number plate images. What we are dealing with is an optical character recognition library that leverages deep learning and attention mechanism to make predictions about what a particular character or word in an image is, if there is one at all. Lots of big words thrown there, so we'll take it step by step and explore the state of OCR technology and different approaches used for these tasks.