Rapid Temporal Information Identification in Paper Worksheets Using Light-Weight Convolutional Neural Networks

Even current OCR technology has made significant progress with the help of deep learning, rapid identification algorithms for specific information in documents still need elaborate design. In this paper, a lightweight operating framework based on deep neural network is established to deal with the extraction of date and time information from paper worksheets used in transformer station. In the framework, YOLOv4-Tiny is employed to detect the locations of the dates and the time in document images which are mixed with printing and handwritten fonts. Since the handwritten dates in pictures are difficult to segment, a novel lightweight CNN named MobileDateNet is proposed that can recognize the date serially without segmentation. The experimental results show that the identification accuracy of the whole framework reaches 92.1% at the average running speed of 36.5 FPS on an NVIDIA 3090 GPU, ensuring the recognition accuracy and the operating efficiency.