The author probably could have used an ANN to segment the images as well before feeding it into another NN to classify the images. This has the benefit of re-us

The author probably could have used an ANN to segment the images as well before feeding it into another NN to classify the images. This has the benefit of re-using the character recognition network, which would better simulate what humans do, since we read new equations character by character into memory (unless we've seen so many that we begin chunking them like speed readers do with word groups)