Can someone explain to me how this is news, given that the handwritten addresses on snail mail envelopes in the US have been OCR'd by neural networks for more than twenty years now?
It's important to remember that performance is critical when talking about machine perception. OCR, handwriting recognition, face recognition, etc. can all be done but at what level of accuracy ? At least until very recently machine performance on these tasks has fallen well short of human level abilities.
Last I heard, the percentage of handwritten mail successfully sorted by a machine had reached in the low 80s. The Russian company Parasoft (who also worked on Newton's online handwriting recognition) has been the leader in this field.
It's like a game of "Where's Waldo" on freaking crack.
You have literally no idea how complex this stuff is now then do you?
I do have an idea (literally, even) that there are additional problems having to do with extracting the house number images themselves from full-motion video, but that's an image registration problem and not an object recognition problem.