It is known that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are efficient for optical character recognition (OCR) and many other visual classification tasks. This paper applies error-correcting output coding (ECOC) to the CNN for segmentation-free OCR such that: 1) the CNN target outputs are designed according to code words of length N; 2) the minimum Hamming distance of the code words is designed to be as large as possible given N. ECOC provides the CNN with the ability to reject or correct output errors to reduce character insertions and substitutions in the recognized text. Also, using code words instead of letter images as the CNN target outputs makes it possible to construct an OCR for a new language without designing the letter images as the target outputs. Experiments on the recognition of English letters, 10 digits, and some special characters show the effectiveness of ECOC in reducing insertions and substitutions.
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