  Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has many real world applications. The
existing methods normally detect where the characters are, and then recognize
the character for each detected location. Thus the accuracy of characters
recognition is impacted by the performance of characters detection. In this
paper, we propose a method for recognizing characters without detecting the
location of each character. This is done by converting the OCR task into an
image captioning task. One advantage of the proposed method is that the labeled
bounding boxes for the characters are not needed during training. The
experimental results show the proposed method outperforms the existing methods
on both the license plate recognition and the watermeter character recognition
tasks. The proposed method is also deployed into a low-power (300mW) CNN
accelerator chip connected to a Raspberry Pi 3 for on-device applications.
