Was the use of ANN necessary, or simply done because it was cool to do? Because at least in my mind it looks like extracting the text and running a brute force program on it would be faster, no?
If my reading is correct, the neural network was used to OCR the image, extracting the text. From there, it is indeed a simple brute-force string search.
Yeah, but the type is pretty regular and and the alphabet is small. I bet you could just use convolution.