This study proposes a generalized framework for detecting and understanding product expiration dates.
Figure 1 shows the overall architecture of the proposed framework.
The proposed framework consists of three networks:
Date detection, DMY detection, and Recognition networks, sequentially.
Given an input image, the date detection network detects the dates
and extracts their regions from the entire input image.
Then, the DMY detection network identifies and extracts the day, month, and
year components from the detected date regions.
Later, the recognition network recognizes the characters of the day, month, and year components.
Finally, the appropriate date is selected as an expiration date after the recognition of characters.
The proposed framework can handle challenging expiration date cases and distinguish
13 different date formats.
It can detect and understand the expiration dates even when the input image contains multiple dates.
