How to recognise partial text on mechanical indicators I would like to know is there any possible approach to recognise digits of the first (and second as well, as you can see in the example figure) order of magnitude. I've thought of neural network with full, half and possibly quarter training samples of the digits I want to recognise, but I don't think this is the best approach. You see, I am new to computer vision and I'd like to see what path should I take to study if there are any for this problem.
If you are using an out-of-the box OCR engine, then there's not much you can do with significantly occluded letters.

However, if you are rolling your own OCR, say with some template-matching, then, there is nothing preventing you from learning/teaching partial letters and their valid combinations (like the 8-9 and 9-0 above). Just treat it as another letter in the set to be recognized.