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What don't you get? One is on a white background. One is in random orientations, placed in complex scenes, with random fonts, positions, numbers, sizes, shapes and locations and you don't even know where they are.

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?

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Compare the addresses at http://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/decorating/eye-cat... and http://mandydouglass.blogspot.com/2010/10/addressing-envelop... . Those are two representative images I picked from the first google hits for "house number" and "handwritten address" respectively - all the others were comparable. Are you seriously going to claim that the house number is harder to recognize than the handwriting?

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.

Those aren't the pictures Google works off - cf. maps.

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