How to extract account number in cheque/check images

Question

I am working on a task to extract the account number from cheque images. My current approach can be divided into 2 steps

1. Localize account number digits (Printed digits)
2. Perform OCR using OCR libraries like Tesseract OCR

The second step is straight forward assuming we have properly localized the account number digits

I tried to localize account number digits using OpenCV contours methods and using MSER (Maximally stable extremal regions) but didn’t get useful results. It’s difficult to generalize pattern because

• Different bank cheques have variations in template
• Account number position is not fixed

How can we approach this problem. Do I have to look for some deep learning based approaches.

Sample Images

Answer 1

Thanks, everyone for the suggestions, I ended up training deep learning object detection method to localize Account number and it gave very good results as compared to OpenCV based methods