A Non-Connectionist Two-Stage Approach to Digit Recognition in the Presence of Noise

This paper introduces a two-stage approach to digit detection and recognition. The approach is cognitively-inspired to the extent that it integrates the dichotomy between the preattentive processing and the attentive processing that is present in the theories of human attention. It is non-connectionist to the extent that it does not require extensive training data, and thus may help in coping with the ever-present problem of lacking representative and balanced training corpora. The approach is demonstrated through a real-life case study of automatic electricity meter reading in the presence of noise.