Handwritten/Printed Receipt Classification Using Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network

This paper presents an approach for the classification of handwritten and printed receipts based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). One of the main challenges related to such classification is the diversity of the background interference in the receipt images. To overcome this problem, we propose a new technique named "attention-based CNN" (ABCNN), inspired by the concept of "attention" in visual neuroscience. This approach helps us to focus on the receipt in an image without bounding box annotation. Our experimental results showed that the proposed ABCNN (i) significantly improves the classification accuracy compared to normal CNN (from 95% to 98.25%), and (ii) enables the network to process images directly without object detection, and (iii) it is faster to train and test the network.