Scene text recognition (STR) has been extensively studied in last few years. Many recently-proposed methods are specially designed to accommodate the arbitrary shape, layout and orientation of scene texts, but ignoring that various font (or writing) styles also pose severe challenges to STR. These methods, where font features and content features of characters are tangled, perform poorly in text recognition on scene images with texts in novel font styles. To address this problem, we explore font-independent features of scene texts via attentional generation of glyphs in a large number of font styles. Specifically, we introduce trainable font embeddings to shape the font styles of generated glyphs, with the image feature of scene text only representing its essential patterns. The generation process is directed by the spatial attention mechanism, which effectively copes with irregular texts and generates higher-quality glyphs than existing image-to-image translation methods. Experiments conducted on several STR benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to the state of the art.
Centre for Vision Information Technology International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院视觉信息技术中心）
Scene-text recognition is remarkably better in Latin languages than the non-Latin languages due to several factors like multiple fonts, simplistic vocabulary statistics, updated data generation tools, and writing systems. This paper examines the possible reasons for low accuracy by comparing English datasets with non-Latin languages. We compare various features like the size (width and height) of the word images and word length statistics. Over the last decade, generating synthetic datasets with powerful deep learning techniques has tremendously improved scene-text recognition. Several control…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
Scene text recognition in low-resource Indian languages is challenging because of complexities like multiple scripts, fonts, text size, and orientations. In this work, we investigate the power of transfer learning for all the layers of deep scene text recognition networks from English to two common Indian languages. We perform experiments on the conventional CRNN model and STAR-Net to ensure generalisability. To study the effect of change in different scripts, we initially run our experiments on synthetic word images rendered using Unicode fonts. We show that the transfer of English models to …
Class-Aware Mask-Guided Feature Refinement for Scene Text Recognition
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学电子信息与通信学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）；Huawei Inc.（华为公司）；School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学软件学院）
New York University（纽约大学）；Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福歌德大学）
Scene text recognition models have advanced greatly in recent years. Inspired by human reading we characterize two important scene text recognition models by measuring their domains i.e. the range of stimulus images that they can read. The domain specifies the ability of readers to generalize to different word lengths, fonts, and amounts of occlusion. These metrics identify strengths and weaknesses of existing models. Relative to the attention-based (Attn) model, we discover that the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model is more robust to noise and occlusion, and better at generali…
Scene text recognition plays an important role in many computer vision applications. The small size of available public available scene text datasets is the main challenge when training a text recognition CNN model. In this paper, we propose a CNN based Chinese text recognition algorithm. To enlarge the dataset for training the CNN model, we design a synthetic data engine for Chinese scene character generation, which generates representative character images according to the fonts use frequency of Chinese texts. As the Chinese text is more complex, the English text recognition CNN architecture…
Contrary to popular belief, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) remains a challenging problem when text occurs in unconstrained environments, like natural scenes, due to geometrical distortions, complex backgrounds, and diverse fonts. In this paper, we present a segmentation-free OCR system that combines deep learning methods, synthetic training data generation, and data augmentation techniques. We render synthetic training data using large text corpora and over 2000 fonts. To simulate text occurring in complex natural scenes, we augment extracted samples with geometric distortions and with a …
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）
Recently self-supervised representation learning has drawn considerable attention from the scene text recognition community. Different from previous studies using contrastive learning, we tackle the issue from an alternative perspective, i.e., by formulating the representation learning scheme in a generative manner. Typically, the neighboring image patches among one text line tend to have similar styles, including the strokes, textures, colors, etc. Motivated by this common sense, we augment one image patch and use its neighboring patch as guidance to recover itself. Specifically, we propose a…
University of Vigo（维戈大学）；University of Sfax, National School of Engineers (ENIS)（斯法克斯大学国家工程师学院）
In this paper we propose a robust approach for text extraction and recognition from video clips which is called Neuro-Fuzzy system for Arabic Video OCR. In Arabic video text recognition, a number of noise components provide the text relatively more complicated to separate from the background. Further, the characters can be moving or presented in a diversity of colors, sizes and fonts that are not uniform. Added to this, is the fact that the background is usually moving making text extraction a more intricate process. Video include two kinds of text, scene text and artificial text. Scene text i…
Scene text recognition with arbitrary shape is very challenging due to large variations in text shapes, fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc. Most state-of-the-art algorithms rectify the input image into the normalized image, then treat the recognition as a sequence prediction task. The bottleneck of such methods is the rectification, which will cause errors due to distortion perspective. In this paper, we find that the rectification is completely unnecessary. What all we need is the spatial attention. We therefore propose a simple but extremely effective scene text recognition method based on tran…
Center for Visual Information Technology, IIIT Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院视觉信息技术中心）
Inspired by the success of Deep Learning based approaches to English scene text recognition, we pose and benchmark scene text recognition for three Indic scripts - Devanagari, Telugu and Malayalam. Synthetic word images rendered from Unicode fonts are used for training the recognition system. And the performance is bench-marked on a new IIIT-ILST dataset comprising of hundreds of real scene images containing text in the above mentioned scripts. We use a segmentation free, hybrid but end-to-end trainable CNN-RNN deep neural network for transcribing the word images to the corresponding texts. Th…
Understanding the meaning of text in images of natural scenes like highway signs or store front emblems is particularly challenging if the text is foreshortened in the image or the letters are artistically distorted. We introduce a pipeline-based text spotting framework that can both detect and recognize text in various fonts, shapes, and orientations in natural scene images with complicated backgrounds. The main contribution of our work is the text detection component, which we call UHT, short for UNet, Heatmap, and Textfill. UHT uses a UNet to compute heatmaps for candidate text regions and …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
Artistic text recognition is an extremely challenging task with a wide range of applications. However, current scene text recognition methods mainly focus on irregular text while have not explored artistic text specifically. The challenges of artistic text recognition include the various appearance with special-designed fonts and effects, the complex connections and overlaps between characters, and the severe interference from background patterns. To alleviate these problems, we propose to recognize the artistic text at three levels. Firstly, corner points are applied to guide the extraction o…
Institute of Engineering & Management, Kolkata（加尔各答工程与管理学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）；Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata（印度统计学院加尔各答分校）
In recent years, recognition of text from natural scene image and video frame has got increased attention among the researchers due to its various complexities and challenges. Because of low resolution, blurring effect, complex background, different fonts, color and variant alignment of text within images and video frames, etc., text recognition in such scenario is difficult. Most of the current approaches usually apply a binarization algorithm to convert them into binary images and next OCR is applied to get the recognition result. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on color cha…
Advancing WordArt-Oriented Scene Text Recognition: Datasets and Methods
Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University（复旦大学可信具身人工智能研究所）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multimodal Embodied AI, Fudan University（复旦大学上海市多模态具身人工智能重点实验室）；WeChat Vision, Tencent Inc.（腾讯微信视觉团队）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
Reading text from natural images is challenging due to the great variety in text font, color, size, complex background and etc.. The perspective distortion and non-linear spatial arrangement of characters make it further difficult. While rectification based method is intuitively grounded and has pushed the envelope by far, its potential is far from being well exploited. In this paper, we present a bag of tricks that prove to significantly improve the performance of rectification based method. On curved text dataset, our method achieves an accuracy of 89.6% on CUTE-80 and 76.3% on Total-Text, a…
Thapar University（塔帕尔大学）；L3i, University of La-Rochelle（拉罗谢尔大学L3i实验室）
In this work, we adhere to explore a Multi-Tasking learning (MTL) based network to perform document attribute classification such as the font type, font size, font emphasis and scanning resolution classification of a document image. To accomplish these tasks, we operate on either segmented word level or on uniformed size patches randomly cropped out of the document. Furthermore, a hybrid convolution neural network (CNN) architecture "MTL+MI", which is based on the combination of MTL and Multi-Instance (MI) of patch and word is used to accomplish joint learning for the classification of the sam…
A Cross-Font Image Retrieval Network for Recognizing Undeciphered Oracle Bone Inscriptions
Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University（厦门大学人工智能学院）；School of Informatics, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；Key Laboratory of Digital Protection and Intelligent Processing of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Fujian and Taiwan (Xiamen University), Ministry of Culture and Tourism（文化和旅游部闽南（厦门大学）非物质文化遗产数字化保护与智能处理重点实验室）
CLOVA AI Research, NAVER Corporation（NAVER公司CLOVA人工智能研究院）；Upstage AI Research（Upstage人工智能研究院）
For successful scene text recognition (STR) models, synthetic text image generators have alleviated the lack of annotated text images from the real world. Specifically, they generate multiple text images with diverse backgrounds, font styles, and text shapes and enable STR models to learn visual patterns that might not be accessible from manually annotated data. In this paper, we introduce a new synthetic text image generator, SynthTIGER, by analyzing techniques used for text image synthesis and integrating effective ones under a single algorithm. Moreover, we propose two techniques that allev…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Huawei Cloud AI（华为云人工智能部门）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Automatic font generation remains a challenging research issue due to the large amounts of characters with complicated structures. Typically, only a few samples can serve as the style/content reference (termed few-shot learning), which further increases the difficulty to preserve local style patterns or detailed glyph structures. We investigate the drawbacks of previous studies and find that a coarse-grained discriminator is insufficient for supervising a font generator. To this end, we propose a novel Component-Aware Module (CAM), which supervises the generator to decouple content and style a…
In a recorded situation, textual information is crucial for scene interpretation and decision making. The ability to edit text directly on images has a number of advantages, including error correction, text restoration, and image reusability. This research shows how to change image text at the letter and digits level. I devised a two-part letters-digits network (LDN) to encode and decode digital images, as well as learn and transfer the font style of the source characters to the target characters. This method allows you to update the uppercase letters, lowercase letters and digits in the pictu…
Automated text detection is a difficult computer vision task. In order to accurately detect and identity text in an image or video, two major problems must be addressed. The primary problem is implementing a robust and reliable method for distinguishing text vs non-text regions in images and videos. Part of the difficulty stems from the almost unlimited combinations of fonts, lighting conditions, distortions, and other variations that can be found in images and videos. This paper explores key properties of two popular and proven methods for implementing text detection; maximum stable external …
Mangalore University（芒格洛尔大学）；KVG College of Engineering（KVG工程学院）
In this paper, we propose a skeleton matching based approach which aids in text localization in scene images. The input image is preprocessed and segmented into blocks using connected component analysis. We obtain the skeleton of the segmented block using morphology based approach. The skeletonized images are compared with the trained templates in the database to categorize into text and non-text blocks. Further, the newly designed geometrical rules and morphological operations are employed on the detected text blocks for scene text localization. The experimental results obtained on publicly a…
Swapping text in scene images while preserving original fonts, colors, sizes and background textures is a challenging task due to the complex interplay between different factors. In this work, we present SwapText, a three-stage framework to transfer texts across scene images. First, a novel text swapping network is proposed to replace text labels only in the foreground image. Second, a background completion network is learned to reconstruct background images. Finally, the generated foreground image and background image are used to generate the word image by the fusion network. Using the propos…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
The rapid progress in 3D scene understanding has come with growing demand for data; however, collecting and annotating 3D scenes (e.g. point clouds) are notoriously hard. For example, the number of scenes (e.g. indoor rooms) that can be accessed and scanned might be limited; even given sufficient data, acquiring 3D labels (e.g. instance masks) requires intensive human labor. In this paper, we explore data-efficient learning for 3D point cloud. As a first step towards this direction, we propose Contrastive Scene Contexts, a 3D pre-training method that makes use of both point-level correspondenc…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；China Electronics Standardization Institute（中国电子技术标准化研究院）；AICFVE of Beijing Film Academy（北京电影学院数字影视动画创作与理论研究北京市重点实验室）
Three-dimensional (3-D) scene reconstruction is one of the key techniques in Augmented Reality (AR), which is related to the integration of image processing and display systems of complex information. Stereo matching is a computer vision based approach for 3-D scene reconstruction. In this paper, we explore an improved stereo matching network, SLED-Net, in which a Single Long Encoder-Decoder is proposed to replace the stacked hourglass network in PSM-Net for better contextual information learning. We compare SLED-Net to state-of-the-art methods recently published, and demonstrate its superior …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；the University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
It is crucial to understand the robustness of text detection models with regard to extensive corruptions, since scene text detection techniques have many practical applications. For systematically exploring this problem, we propose two datasets from which to evaluate scene text detection models: ICDAR2015-C (IC15-C) and CTW1500-C (CTW-C). Our study extends the investigation of the performance and robustness of the proposed region proposal, regression and segmentation-based scene text detection frameworks. Furthermore, we perform a robustness analysis of six key components: pre-training data, b…
IIT Jodhpur（印度理工学院焦特布尔分校）；University of Rouen（鲁昂大学）；Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）
Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia …
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
In this paper we explore two ways of using context for object detection. The first model focusses on people and the objects they commonly interact with, such as fashion and sports accessories. The second model considers more general object detection and uses the spatial relationships between objects and between objects and scenes. Our models are able to capture precise spatial relationships between the context and the object of interest, and make effective use of the appearance of the contextual region. On the newly released COCO dataset, our models provide relative improvements of up to 5% ov…
Exploring Scene Affinity for Semi-Supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University（武汉大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University（海南大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University（武汉大学电子信息学院）；State Key Lab. of LIESMARS, Wuhan University（武汉大学LIESMARS国家重点实验室）；Institute for Math & AI, Wuhan University（武汉大学数学与人工智能研究院）
Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术研究所）
As one of the fundamental problems in document analysis, scene character recognition has attracted considerable interests in recent years. But the problem is still considered to be extremely challenging due to many uncontrollable factors including glyph transformation, blur, noisy background, uneven illumination, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for boosting scene character recognition by learning canonical forms of glyphs, based on the fact that characters appearing in scene images are all derived from their corresponding canonical forms. Our key observation is that more dis…
Text removal algorithms have been proposed for uni-lingual scripts with regular shapes and layouts. However, to the best of our knowledge, a generic text removal method which is able to remove all or user-specified text regions regardless of font, script, language or shape is not available. Developing such a generic text eraser for real scenes is a challenging task, since it inherits all the challenges of multi-lingual and curved text detection and inpainting. To fill this gap, we propose a mask-based text removal network (MTRNet). MTRNet is a conditional adversarial generative network (cGAN) …
NuiWorld: Exploring a Scalable Framework for End-to-End Controllable World Generation
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国家阳明交通大学）；Simon Fraser University, CIFAR AI Chair, Amii（西蒙弗雷泽大学、CIFAR人工智能主席、Amii）
SceneMixer: Exploring Convolutional Mixing Networks for Remote Sensing Scene Classification
College of Engineering（工程学院）；University of Dubai（迪拜大学）；Department of Geography（地理系）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；Tezpur University（泰朱普大学）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；GuangZhou University（广州大学）
Scene text editing (STE) aims to replace text with the desired one while preserving background and styles of the original text. However, due to the complicated background textures and various text styles, existing methods fall short in generating clear and legible edited text images. In this study, we attribute the poor editing performance to two problems: 1) Implicit decoupling structure. Previous methods of editing the whole image have to learn different translation rules of background and text regions simultaneously. 2) Domain gap. Due to the lack of edited real scene text images, the netwo…
A color image contains luminance and chrominance components representing the intensity and color information respectively. The objective of the work presented in this paper is to show the significance of incorporating the chrominance information for the task of scene classification. An improved color-to-grayscale image conversion algorithm by effectively incorporating the chrominance information is proposed using color-to-gay structure similarity index (C2G-SSIM) and singular value decomposition (SVD) to improve the perceptual quality of the converted grayscale images. The experimental result …
National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST)（国立科技大学）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
Semantic segmentation of raw 3D point clouds is an essential component in 3D scene analysis, but it poses several challenges, primarily due to the non-Euclidean nature of 3D point clouds. Although, several deep learning based approaches have been proposed to address this task, but almost all of them emphasized on using the latent (global) feature representations from traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN), resulting in severe loss of spatial information, thus failing to model the geometry of the underlying 3D objects, that plays an important role in remote sensing 3D scenes. In this l…
STD-GS: Exploring Frame-Event Interaction for SpatioTemporal-Disentangled Gaussian Splatting to Reconstruct High-Dynamic Scene
National Key Lab of Multispectral Information Intelligent Processing Technology（多谱信息智能处理国家级重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；School of Computing, National University of Singapore（计算机学院，新加坡国立大学）
The robustness of semantic segmentation on edge cases of traffic scene is a vital factor for the safety of intelligent transportation. However, most of the critical scenes of traffic accidents are extremely dynamic and previously unseen, which seriously harm the performance of semantic segmentation methods. In addition, the delay of the traditional camera during high-speed driving will further reduce the contextual information in the time dimension. Therefore, we propose to extract dynamic context from event-based data with a higher temporal resolution to enhance static RGB images, even for th…
