Modeling semantic information is helpful for scene text recognition. In this work, we propose to model semantic and visual information jointly with a Visual-Semantic Transformer (VST). The VST first explicitly extracts primary semantic information from visual feature maps with a transformer module and a primary visual-semantic alignment module. The semantic information is then joined with the visual feature maps (viewed as a sequence) to form a pseudo multi-domain sequence combining visual and semantic information, which is subsequently fed into an transformer-based interaction module to enable learning of interactions between visual and semantic features. In this way, the visual features can be enhanced by the semantic information and vice versus. The enhanced version of visual features are further decoded by a secondary visual-semantic alignment module which shares weights with the primary one. Finally, the decoded visual features and the enhanced semantic features are jointly processed by the third transformer module obtaining the final text prediction. Experiments on seven public benchmarks including regular/ irregular text recognition datasets verifies the effectiveness our proposed model, reaching state of the art on four of the seven benchmarks.
Automated recognition of texts in scenes has been a research challenge for years, largely due to the arbitrary variation of text appearances in perspective distortion, text line curvature, text styles and different types of imaging artifacts. The recent deep networks are capable of learning robust representations with respect to imaging artifacts and text style changes, but still face various problems while dealing with scene texts with perspective and curvature distortions. This paper presents an end-to-end trainable scene text recognition system (ESIR) that iteratively removes perspective di…
Scene text recognition has attracted increasing interest in recent years due to its wide range of applications in multilingual translation, autonomous driving, etc. In this report, we describe our solution to the Out of Vocabulary Scene Text Understanding (OOV-ST) Challenge, which aims to extract out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words from natural scene images. Our oCLIP-based model achieves 28.59\% in h-mean which ranks 1st in end-to-end OOV word recognition track of OOV Challenge in ECCV2022 TiE Workshop.
Hasso-Plattner-Institute（哈索·普拉特纳研究所）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
Over the past few years, several new methods for scene text recognition have been proposed. Most of these methods propose novel building blocks for neural networks. These novel building blocks are specially tailored for the task of scene text recognition and can thus hardly be used in any other tasks. In this paper, we introduce a new model for scene text recognition that only consists of off-the-shelf building blocks for neural networks. Our model (KISS) consists of two ResNet based feature extractors, a spatial transformer, and a transformer. We train our model only on publicly available, sy…
Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai University（上海大学上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）
Although recent works based on deep learning have made progress in improving recognition accuracy on scene text recognition, how to handle low-quality text images in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Fusion based Recognizer (IFR) for low quality scene text recognition, taking advantage of refined text images input and robust feature representation. IFR contains two branches which focus on scene text recognition and low quality scene text image recovery respectively. We utilize an iterative collaboration between two branches, which can…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Deep learning based methods have achieved surprising progress in Scene Text Recognition (STR), one of classic problems in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a feasible framework for multi-lingual arbitrary-shaped STR, including instance segmentation based text detection and language model based attention mechanism for text recognition. Our STR algorithm not only recognizes Latin and Non-Latin characters, but also supports arbitrary-shaped text recognition. Our method wins the championship on Scene Text Spotting Task (Latin Only, Latin and Chinese) of ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge …
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…
Scene Text Recognition is a challenging problem because of irregular styles and various distortions. This paper proposed an end-to-end trainable model consists of a finer rectification module and a bidirectional attentional recognition network(Firbarn). The rectification module adopts finer grid to rectify the distorted input image and the bidirectional decoder contains only one decoding layer instead of two separated one. Firbarn can be trained in a weak supervised way, only requiring the scene text images and the corresponding word labels. With the flexible rectification and the novel bidire…
School of Electronic Information and Communications（电子信息与通信学院）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Image-based sequence recognition has been a long-standing research topic in computer vision. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text recognition, which is among the most important and challenging tasks in image-based sequence recognition. A novel neural network architecture, which integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a unified framework, is proposed. Compared with previous systems for scene text recognition, the proposed architecture possesses four distinctive properties: (1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most of the existing algo…
The prevalent perspectives of scene text recognition are from sequence to sequence (seq2seq) and segmentation. Nevertheless, the former is composed of many components which makes implementation and deployment complicated, while the latter requires character level annotations that is expensive. In this paper, we revisit classification perspective that models scene text recognition as an image classification problem. Classification perspective has a simple pipeline and only needs word level annotations. We revive classification perspective by devising a scene text recognition model named as CSTR…
CMFN: Cross-Modal Fusion Network for Irregular Scene Text Recognition
Intelligent Software Research Center, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所智能软件研究中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；The Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所复杂系统认知与决策智能实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所计算机科学国家重点实验室）
Leveraging the advances of natural language processing, most recent scene text recognizers adopt an encoder-decoder architecture where text images are first converted to representative features and then a sequence of characters via `sequential decoding'. However, scene text images suffer from rich noises of different sources such as complex background and geometric distortions which often confuse the decoder and lead to incorrect alignment of visual features at noisy decoding time steps. This paper presents I2C2W, a novel scene text recognition technique that is tolerant to geometric and photo…
E.SUN Financial Holding CO., LTD.（玉山金融控股股份有限公司）；National Kaohsiung Normal University（高雄师范大学）
Scene text recognition (STR) has been widely studied in academia and industry. Training a text recognition model often requires a large amount of labeled data, but data labeling can be difficult, expensive, or time-consuming, especially for Traditional Chinese text recognition. To the best of our knowledge, public datasets for Traditional Chinese text recognition are lacking. This paper presents a framework for a Traditional Chinese synthetic data engine which aims to improve text recognition model performance. We generated over 20 million synthetic data and collected over 7,000 manually label…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）
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 …
Scene text recognition (STR) enables computers to recognize and read the text in various real-world scenes. Recent STR models benefit from taking linguistic information in addition to visual cues into consideration. We propose a novel Masked Vision-Language Transformers (MVLT) to capture both the explicit and the implicit linguistic information. Our encoder is a Vision Transformer, and our decoder is a multi-modal Transformer. MVLT is trained in two stages: in the first stage, we design a STR-tailored pretraining method based on a masking strategy; in the second stage, we fine-tune our model a…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
In this paper, we propose an effective scene text recognition method using sparse coding based features, called Histograms of Sparse Codes (HSC) features. For character detection, we use the HSC features instead of using the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features. The HSC features are extracted by computing sparse codes with dictionaries that are learned from data using K-SVD, and aggregating per-pixel sparse codes to form local histograms. For word recognition, we integrate multiple cues including character detection scores and geometric contexts in an objective function. The final r…
Scene text recognition (STR) task has a common practice: All state-of-the-art STR models are trained on large synthetic data. In contrast to this practice, training STR models only on fewer real labels (STR with fewer labels) is important when we have to train STR models without synthetic data: for handwritten or artistic texts that are difficult to generate synthetically and for languages other than English for which we do not always have synthetic data. However, there has been implicit common knowledge that training STR models on real data is nearly impossible because real data is insufficie…
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Scene text recognition is a challenging task due to diverse variations of text instances in natural scene images. Conventional methods based on CNN-RNN-CTC or encoder-decoder with attention mechanism may not fully investigate stable and efficient feature representations for multi-oriented scene texts. In this paper, we propose a primitive representation learning method that aims to exploit intrinsic representations of scene text images. We model elements in feature maps as the nodes of an undirected graph. A pooling aggregator and a weighted aggregator are proposed to learn primitive represent…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）
We consider the scene text recognition problem under the attention-based encoder-decoder framework, which is the state of the art. The existing methods usually employ a frame-wise maximal likelihood loss to optimize the models. When we train the model, the misalignment between the ground truth strings and the attention's output sequences of probability distribution, which is caused by missing or superfluous characters, will confuse and mislead the training process, and consequently make the training costly and degrade the recognition accuracy. To handle this problem, we propose a novel method …
Center for Visual Information Technology, IIIT Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所视觉信息技术中心）
Building robust recognizers for Arabic has always been challenging. We demonstrate the effectiveness of an end-to-end trainable CNN-RNN hybrid architecture in recognizing Arabic text in videos and natural scenes. We outperform previous state-of-the-art on two publicly available video text datasets - ALIF and ACTIV. For the scene text recognition task, we introduce a new Arabic scene text dataset and establish baseline results. For scripts like Arabic, a major challenge in developing robust recognizers is the lack of large quantity of annotated data. We overcome this by synthesising millions of…
In this work we present a framework for the recognition of natural scene text. Our framework does not require any human-labelled data, and performs word recognition on the whole image holistically, departing from the character based recognition systems of the past. The deep neural network models at the centre of this framework are trained solely on data produced by a synthetic text generation engine -- synthetic data that is highly realistic and sufficient to replace real data, giving us infinite amounts of training data. This excess of data exposes new possibilities for word recognition model…
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…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Scene text recognition (STR) involves the task of reading text in cropped images of natural scenes. Conventional models in STR employ convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by recurrent neural network in an encoder-decoder framework. In recent times, the transformer architecture is being widely adopted in STR as it shows strong capability in capturing long-term dependency which appears to be prominent in scene text images. Many researchers utilized transformer as part of a hybrid CNN-transformer encoder, often followed by a transformer decoder. However, such methods only make use of the l…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；SCUT-Zhuhai Institute of Modern Industrial Innovation（华南理工大学珠海现代产业创新研究院）
Irregular text is widely used. However, it is considerably difficult to recognize because of its various shapes and distorted patterns. In this paper, we thus propose a multi-object rectified attention network (MORAN) for general scene text recognition. The MORAN consists of a multi-object rectification network and an attention-based sequence recognition network. The multi-object rectification network is designed for rectifying images that contain irregular text. It decreases the difficulty of recognition and enables the attention-based sequence recognition network to more easily read irregula…
King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences（沙特·本·阿卜杜勒阿齐兹健康科学大学）；Malaysia Japan Institute of Information Technology (MJIIT)（马来西亚日本信息技术研究所）；Universiti Teknologi Malaysia（马来西亚理工大学）；GGPGC No.1, Abbottabad（阿伯塔巴德第一政府研究生院）；Higher Education Department, Khyber Pakhtunkhua (KPK)（开伯尔-普赫图赫瓦省高等教育厅）
The technological advancement and sophistication in cameras and gadgets prompt researchers to have focus on image analysis and text understanding. The deep learning techniques demonstrated well to assess the potential for classifying text from natural scene images as reported in recent years. There are variety of deep learning approaches that prospects the detection and recognition of text, effectively from images. In this work, we presented Arabic scene text recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) as a deep learning classifier. As the scene text data is slanted and skewed, …
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…
Scene text image contains two levels of contents: visual texture and semantic information. Although the previous scene text recognition methods have made great progress over the past few years, the research on mining semantic information to assist text recognition attracts less attention, only RNN-like structures are explored to implicitly model semantic information. However, we observe that RNN based methods have some obvious shortcomings, such as time-dependent decoding manner and one-way serial transmission of semantic context, which greatly limit the help of semantic information and the co…
Recent works in the text recognition area have pushed forward the recognition results to the new horizons. But for a long time a lack of large human-labeled natural text recognition datasets has been forcing researchers to use synthetic data for training text recognition models. Even though synthetic datasets are very large (MJSynth and SynthTest, two most famous synthetic datasets, have several million images each), their diversity could be insufficient, compared to natural datasets like ICDAR and others. Fortunately, the recently released text-recognition annotation for OpenImages V5 dataset…
Scene text recognition has made significant progress in recent years and has become an important part of the work-flow. The widespread use of mobile devices opens up wide possibilities for using OCR technologies in everyday life. However, lack of training data for new research in this area remains relevant. In this article, we present a new dataset consisting of real shots on smartphones and demonstrate the effectiveness of profile normalization in this task. In addition, the influence of various augmentations during the training of models for analyzing document images on smartphones is studie…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Megvii (Face++)（旷视（Face++））
Inspired by speech recognition, recent state-of-the-art algorithms mostly consider scene text recognition as a sequence prediction problem. Though achieving excellent performance, these methods usually neglect an important fact that text in images are actually distributed in two-dimensional space. It is a nature quite different from that of speech, which is essentially a one-dimensional signal. In principle, directly compressing features of text into a one-dimensional form may lose useful information and introduce extra noise. In this paper, we approach scene text recognition from a two-dimens…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Scene text recognition is a hot research topic in computer vision. Recently, many recognition methods based on the encoder-decoder framework have been proposed, and they can handle scene texts of perspective distortion and curve shape. Nevertheless, they still face lots of challenges like image blur, uneven illumination, and incomplete characters. We argue that most encoder-decoder methods are based on local visual features without explicit global semantic information. In this work, we propose a semantics enhanced encoder-decoder framework to robustly recognize low-quality scene texts. The sem…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Recently, scene text recognition methods based on deep learning have sprung up in computer vision area. The existing methods achieved great performances, but the recognition of irregular text is still challenging due to the various shapes and distorted patterns. Consider that at the time of reading words in the real world, normally we will not rectify it in our mind but adjust our focus and visual fields. Similarly, through utilizing deformable convolutional layers whose geometric structures are adjustable, we present an enhanced recognition network without the steps of rectification to deal w…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Huawei Cloud AI（华为云人工智能部门）；IntSig Information Co., Ltd（合合信息科技股份有限公司）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
End-to-end scene text spotting has attracted great attention in recent years due to the success of excavating the intrinsic synergy of the scene text detection and recognition. However, recent state-of-the-art methods usually incorporate detection and recognition simply by sharing the backbone, which does not directly take advantage of the feature interaction between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end scene text spotting framework termed SwinTextSpotter. Using a transformer encoder with dynamic head as the detector, we unify the two tasks with a novel Recognition Convers…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology Peking University, Beijing, China Email
Scene text recognition (STR) is a challenging problem due to the imperfect imagery conditions in natural images. State-of-the-art methods utilize both visual cues and linguistic knowledge to tackle this challenging problem. Specifically, they propose iterative language modeling module (IterLM) to repeatedly refine the output sequence from the visual modeling module (VM). Though achieving promising results, the vision modeling module has become the performance bottleneck of these methods. In this paper, we newly propose iterative vision modeling module (IterVM) to further improve the STR accura…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Media Integration and Communication Center (MICC)（媒体集成与通信中心 (MICC)）；Universita di Firenze（佛罗伦萨大学）
In this paper we propose an approach to lexicon-free recognition of text in scene images. Our approach relies on a LSTM-based soft visual attention model learned from convolutional features. A set of feature vectors are derived from an intermediate convolutional layer corresponding to different areas of the image. This permits encoding of spatial information into the image representation. In this way, the framework is able to learn how to selectively focus on different parts of the image. At every time step the recognizer emits one character using a weighted combination of the convolutional fe…
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multidimensional Information Processing（上海市多维信息处理重点实验室）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Videt Tech Ltd.（Videt科技有限公司）
Texts from scene images typically consist of several characters and exhibit a characteristic sequence structure. Existing methods capture the structure with the sequence-to-sequence models by an encoder to have the visual representations and then a decoder to translate the features into the label sequence. In this paper, we study text recognition framework by considering the long-term temporal dependencies in the encoder stage. We demonstrate that the proposed Temporal Convolutional Encoder with increased sequential extents improves the accuracy of text recognition. We also study the impact of…
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…
Dominant scene text recognition models commonly contain two building blocks, a visual model for feature extraction and a sequence model for text transcription. This hybrid architecture, although accurate, is complex and less efficient. In this study, we propose a Single Visual model for Scene Text recognition within the patch-wise image tokenization framework, which dispenses with the sequential modeling entirely. The method, termed SVTR, firstly decomposes an image text into small patches named character components. Afterward, hierarchical stages are recurrently carried out by component-level…
Text Recognition is one of the challenging tasks of computer vision with considerable practical interest. Optical character recognition (OCR) enables different applications for automation. This project focuses on word detection and recognition in natural images. In comparison to reading text in scanned documents, the targeted problem is significantly more challenging. The use case in focus facilitates the possibility to detect the text area in natural scenes with greater accuracy because of the availability of images under constraints. This is achieved using a camera mounted on a truck capturi…
Synthetic data has been a critical tool for training scene text detection and recognition models. On the one hand, synthetic word images have proven to be a successful substitute for real images in training scene text recognizers. On the other hand, however, scene text detectors still heavily rely on a large amount of manually annotated real-world images, which are expensive. In this paper, we introduce UnrealText, an efficient image synthesis method that renders realistic images via a 3D graphics engine. 3D synthetic engine provides realistic appearance by rendering scene and text as a whole,…
Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学哈索·普拉特纳学院）
Detecting and recognizing text in natural scene images is a challenging, yet not completely solved task. In recent years several new systems that try to solve at least one of the two sub-tasks (text detection and text recognition) have been proposed. In this paper we present SEE, a step towards semi-supervised neural networks for scene text detection and recognition, that can be optimized end-to-end. Most existing works consist of multiple deep neural networks and several pre-processing steps. In contrast to this, we propose to use a single deep neural network, that learns to detect and recogn…
Arbitrary text appearance poses a great challenge in scene text recognition tasks. Existing works mostly handle with the problem in consideration of the shape distortion, including perspective distortions, line curvature or other style variations. Therefore, methods based on spatial transformers are extensively studied. However, chromatic difficulties in complex scenes have not been paid much attention on. In this work, we introduce a new learnable geometric-unrelated module, the Structure-Preserving Inner Offset Network (SPIN), which allows the color manipulation of source data within the net…
In recent years, scene text recognition is always regarded as a sequence-to-sequence problem. Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and Attentional sequence recognition (Attn) are two very prevailing approaches to tackle this problem while they may fail in some scenarios respectively. CTC concentrates more on every individual character but is weak in text semantic dependency modeling. Attn based methods have better context semantic modeling ability while tends to overfit on limited training data. In this paper, we elaborately design a Rectified Attentional Double Supervised Network (ReAD…
Text recognition in natural scene is a challenging problem due to the many factors affecting text appearance. In this paper, we presents a method that directly transcribes scene text images to text without needing of sophisticated character segmentation. We leverage recent advances of deep neural networks to model the appearance of scene text images with temporal dynamics. Specifically, we integrates convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) which is motivated by observing the complementary modeling capabilities of the two models. The main contribution of this work …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Meituan（美团）
While scene text recognition techniques have been widely used in commercial applications, data privacy has rarely been taken into account by this research community. Most existing algorithms have assumed a set of shared or centralized training data. However, in practice, data may be distributed on different local devices that can not be centralized to share due to the privacy restrictions. In this paper, we study how to make use of decentralized datasets for training a robust scene text recognizer while keeping them stay on local devices. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first fram…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Scene Text Recognition (STR) models have achieved high performance in recent years on benchmark datasets where text images are presented with minimal noise. Traditional STR recognition pipelines take a cropped image as sole input and attempt to identify the characters present. This infrastructure can fail in instances where the input image is noisy or the text is partially obscured. This paper proposes using semantic information from the greater scene to contextualise predictions. We generate semantic vectors using object tags and fuse this information into a transformer-based architecture. Th…
REsearch Groups in Intelligent Machines Laboratory（智能机器研究组实验室）；ENIS-Sfax（斯法克斯国立工程师学院）；Higher Institute of Computer Science and Communication Techniques（高等计算机科学与通信技术学院）；University of Sousse（苏塞大学）；Al Baha University（巴哈大学）；Laboratoire d’InfoRmatique en Images et Systmes d’information (LIRIS)（图像与信息系统信息学实验室（LIRIS））；INSA of Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）
The recognition of texts existing in camera-captured images has become an important issue for a great deal of research during the past few decades. This give birth to Scene Character Recognition (SCR) which is an important step in scene text recognition pipeline. In this paper, we extended the Bag of Features (BoF)-based model using deep learning for representing features for accurate SCR of different languages. In the features coding step, a deep Sparse Auto-encoder (SAE)-based strategy was applied to enhance the representative and discriminative abilities of image features. This deep learnin…
This paper presents a novel training method for end-to-end scene text recognition. End-to-end scene text recognition offers high recognition accuracy, especially when using the encoder-decoder model based on Transformer. To train a highly accurate end-to-end model, we need to prepare a large image-to-text paired dataset for the target language. However, it is difficult to collect this data, especially for resource-poor languages. To overcome this difficulty, our proposed method utilizes well-prepared large datasets in resource-rich languages such as English, to train the resource-poor encoder-…
Megvii（旷视科技）；China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
The pursuit of high performance on public benchmarks has been the driving force for research in scene text recognition, and notable progress has been achieved. However, a close investigation reveals a startling fact that the state-of-the-art methods perform well on images with words within vocabulary but generalize poorly to images with words outside vocabulary. We call this phenomenon "vocabulary reliance". In this paper, we establish an analytical framework to conduct an in-depth study on the problem of vocabulary reliance in scene text recognition. Key findings include: (1) Vocabulary relia…
Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization. Existing approaches are usually built based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for char-level text generation. In addition, another language model is usually needed to improve the overall accuracy as a post-processing step. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end text recognition approach with pre-trained image Transformer and text Transformer models, namely TrOCR, which leverages the Transformer architecture for both image understanding and wordpiece-level text generation. The TrOCR model is simple but effec…
Megvii（旷视科技）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Scene text recognition has been an important, active research topic in computer vision for years. Previous approaches mainly consider text as 1D signals and cast scene text recognition as a sequence prediction problem, by feat of CTC or attention based encoder-decoder framework, which is originally designed for speech recognition. However, different from speech voices, which are 1D signals, text instances are essentially distributed in 2D image spaces. To adhere to and make use of the 2D nature of text for higher recognition accuracy, we extend the vanilla CTC model to a second dimension, thus…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；SenseTime Group Ltd.（商汤集团有限公司）
Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention mechanism are two main approaches used in recent scene text recognition works. Compared with attention-based methods, CTC decoder has a much shorter inference time, yet a lower accuracy. To design an efficient and effective model, we propose the guided training of CTC (GTC), where CTC model learns a better alignment and feature representations from a more powerful attentional guidance. With the benefit of guided training, CTC model achieves robust and accurate prediction for both regular and irregular scene text while maintaining a fast…
Indoor scene recognition is a growing field with great potential for behaviour understanding, robot localization, and elderly monitoring, among others. In this study, we approach the task of scene recognition from a novel standpoint, using multi-modal learning and video data gathered from social media. The accessibility and variety of social media videos can provide realistic data for modern scene recognition techniques and applications. We propose a model based on fusion of transcribed speech to text and visual features, which is used for classification on a novel dataset of social media vide…
