Compact disc serial number inspection system

This paper presents a reliable neural network based system for compact disc serial number inspection. Four major steps are performed in this system, namely polar image conversion, segmentation, recognition, and verification. Polar image conversion straightens the circular stripe images containing the serial numbers to horizontally linear images, segmentation divides the images into separate character segments, recognition classifies the separate character segments by a trained neural network, and verification double checks the characters with their verification neural networks if the serial number is known. Special back-propagation training processes for recognition and verification neural networks are used to increase the system's performance. Excellent recognition results for this system implemented in the Sony SUPER vision system have been obtained. Moreover, this system can process more than 3 compact discs in one second.