• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.6-10
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• 2021

Recognition of characters printed or marked on the PCB components from images captured using cameras is an important task in PCB components inspection systems. Previous optical character recognition (OCR) of PCB components typically consists of two stages: character segmentation and classification of each segmented character. However, character segmentation often fails due to corrupted characters, low image contrast, etc. Thus, OCR without character segmentation is desirable and increasingly used via deep neural networks. Typical implementation based on deep neural nets without character segmentation includes convolutional neural network followed by recurrent neural network (RNN). However, one disadvantage of this approach is slow execution due to RNN layers. LPRNet is a segmentation-free character recognition network with excellent accuracy proved in license plate recognition. LPRNet uses a wide convolution instead of RNN, thus enabling fast inference. In this paper, LPRNet was adapted for recognizing characters printed on PCB components with fast execution and high accuracy. Initial training with synthetic images followed by fine-tuning on real text images yielded accurate recognition. This net can be further optimized on Intel CPU using OpenVINO tool kit. The optimized version of the network can be run in real-time faster than even GPU.