In this paper, we address the problem of having characters with different scales in scene text recognition. We propose a novel scale aware feature encoder (SAFE) that is designed specifically for encoding characters with different scales. SAFE is composed of a multi-scale convolutional encoder and a scale attention network. The multi-scale convolutional encoder targets at extracting character features under multiple scales, and the scale attention network is responsible for selecting features from the most relevant scale(s). SAFE has two main advantages over the traditional single-CNN encoder used in current state-of-the-art text recognizers. First, it explicitly tackles the scale problem by extracting scale-invariant features from the characters. This allows the recognizer to put more effort in handling other challenges in scene text recognition, like those caused by view distortion and poor image quality. Second, it can transfer the learning of feature encoding across different character scales. This is particularly important when the training set has a very unbalanced distribution of character scales, as training with such a dataset will make the encoder biased towards extracting features from the predominant scale. To evaluate the effectiveness of SAFE, we design a simple text recognizer named scale-spatial attention network (S-SAN) that employs SAFE as its feature encoder, and carry out experiments on six public benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that S-SAN can achieve state-of-the-art (or, in some cases, extremely competitive) performance without any post-processing.
@cite_31: Driven by the wide range of applications, scene text detection and recognition have become active research topics in computer vision. Though extensively studied, localizing and reading text in uncontrolled environments remain extremely challenging, due to various interference factors. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale representation for scene text recognition. This representation consists of a set of detectable primitives, termed as strokelets, which capture the essential substructures of characters at different granularities. Strokelets possess four distinctive advantages: (1) Usability: automatically learned from bounding box labels, (2) Robustness: insensitive to interference factors, (3) Generality: applicable to variant languages, and (4) Expressivity: effective at describing characters. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks verify the advantages of strokelets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for text recognition.
@cite_18: We describe Photo OCR, a system for text extraction from images. Our particular focus is reliable text extraction from smartphone imagery, with the goal of text recognition as a user input modality similar to speech recognition. Commercially available OCR performs poorly on this task. Recent progress in machine learning has substantially improved isolated character classification, we build on this progress by demonstrating a complete OCR system using these techniques. We also incorporate modern data center-scale distributed language modelling. Our approach is capable of recognizing text in a variety of challenging imaging conditions where traditional OCR systems fail, notably in the presence of substantial blur, low resolution, low contrast, high image noise and other distortions. It also operates with low latency, mean processing time is 600 ms per image. We evaluate our system on public benchmark datasets for text extraction and outperform all previously reported results, more than halving the error rate on multiple benchmarks. The system is currently in use in many applications at Google, and is available as a user input modality in Google Translate for Android.
@cite_4: The goal of this work is text spotting in natural images. This is divided into two sequential tasks: detecting words regions in the image, and recognizing the words within these regions. We make the following contributions: first, we develop a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier that can be used for both tasks. The CNN has a novel architecture that enables efficient feature sharing (by using a number of layers in common) for text detection, character case-sensitive and insensitive classification, and bigram classification. It exceeds the state-of-the-art performance for all of these. Second, we make a number of technical changes over the traditional CNN architectures, including no downsampling for a per-pixel sliding window, and multi-mode learning with a mixture of linear models (maxout). Third, we have a method of automated data mining of Flickr, that generates word and character level annotations. Finally, these components are used together to form an end-to-end, state-of-the-art text spotting system. We evaluate the text-spotting system on two standard benchmarks, the ICDAR Robust Reading data set and the Street View Text data set, and demonstrate improvements over the state-of-the-art on multiple measures.
@cite_26: Abstract: We develop a representation suitable for the unconstrained recognition of words in natural images: the general case of no fixed lexicon and unknown length. To this end we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based architecture which incorporates a Conditional Random Field (CRF) graphical model, taking the whole word image as a single input. The unaries of the CRF are provided by a CNN that predicts characters at each position of the output, while higher order terms are provided by another CNN that detects the presence of N-grams. We show that this entire model (CRF, character predictor, N-gram predictor) can be jointly optimised by back-propagating the structured output loss, essentially requiring the system to perform multi-task learning, and training uses purely synthetically generated data. The resulting model is a more accurate system on standard real-world text recognition benchmarks than character prediction alone, setting a benchmark for systems that have not been trained on a particular lexicon. In addition, our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in lexicon-constrained scenarios, without being specifically modelled for constrained recognition. To test the generalisation of our model, we also perform experiments with random alpha-numeric strings to evaluate the method when no visual language model is applicable.
@cite_8: This paper focuses on the problem of word detection and recognition in natural images. The problem is significantly more challenging than reading text in scanned documents, and has only recently gained attention from the computer vision community. Sub-components of the problem, such as text detection and cropped image word recognition, have been studied in isolation [7, 4, 20]. However, what is unclear is how these recent approaches contribute to solving the end-to-end problem of word recognition. We fill this gap by constructing and evaluating two systems. The first, representing the de facto state-of-the-art, is a two stage pipeline consisting of text detection followed by a leading OCR engine. The second is a system rooted in generic object recognition, an extension of our previous work in [20]. We show that the latter approach achieves superior performance. While scene text recognition has generally been treated with highly domain-specific methods, our results demonstrate the suitability of applying generic computer vision methods. Adopting this approach opens the door for real world scene text recognition to benefit from the rapid advances that have been taking place in object recognition.
@cite_27: An end-to-end real-time scene text localization and recognition method is presented. The real-time performance is achieved by posing the character detection problem as an efficient sequential selection from the set of Extremal Regions (ERs). The ER detector is robust to blur, illumination, color and texture variation and handles low-contrast text. In the first classification stage, the probability of each ER being a character is estimated using novel features calculated with O(1) complexity per region tested. Only ERs with locally maximal probability are selected for the second stage, where the classification is improved using more computationally expensive features. A highly efficient exhaustive search with feedback loops is then applied to group ERs into words and to select the most probable character segmentation. Finally, text is recognized in an OCR stage trained using synthetic fonts. The method was evaluated on two public datasets. On the ICDAR 2011 dataset, the method achieves state-of-the-art text localization results amongst published methods and it is the first one to report results for end-to-end text recognition. On the more challenging Street View Text dataset, the method achieves state-of-the-art recall. The robustness of the proposed method against noise and low contrast of characters is demonstrated by “false positives” caused by detected watermark text in the dataset.
@cite_2: We present a method for spotting words in the wild, i.e., in real images taken in unconstrained environments. Text found in the wild has a surprising range of difficulty. At one end of the spectrum, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applied to scanned pages of well formatted printed text is one of the most successful applications of computer vision to date. At the other extreme lie visual CAPTCHAs - text that is constructed explicitly to fool computer vision algorithms. Both tasks involve recognizing text, yet one is nearly solved while the other remains extremely challenging. In this work, we argue that the appearance of words in the wild spans this range of difficulties and propose a new word recognition approach based on state-of-the-art methods from generic object recognition, in which we consider object categories to be the words themselves. We compare performance of leading OCR engines - one open source and one proprietary - with our new approach on the ICDAR Robust Reading data set and a new word spotting data set we introduce in this paper: the Street View Text data set. We show improvements of up to 16 on the data sets, demonstrating the feasibility of a new approach to a seemingly old problem.
@cite_15: Full end-to-end text recognition in natural images is a challenging problem that has received much attention recently. Traditional systems in this area have relied on elaborate models incorporating carefully hand-engineered features or large amounts of prior knowledge. In this paper, we take a different route and combine the representational power of large, multilayer neural networks together with recent developments in unsupervised feature learning, which allows us to use a common framework to train highly-accurate text detector and character recognizer modules. Then, using only simple off-the-shelf methods, we integrate these two modules into a full end-to-end, lexicon-driven, scene text recognition system that achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, namely Street View Text and ICDAR 2003.
Recognizers based on the bottom-up approach first perform individual character detection and recognition using character-level classifiers, and then they integrate the results across the whole text image to get the final word recognition. In @cite_2 @cite_8 @cite_27 @cite_31 , traditional hand-crafted features ( , HOG) were employed to train classifiers for detecting and recognizing characters in the text image. With the recent success of deep learning, many methods @cite_15 @cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_26 used deep neural networks to train character classifiers. In @cite_15 , Wang al employed a CNN to extract features from the text image for character recognition. @cite_18 first over-segmented the whole text image into multiple character regions before using a fully-connected neural network for character recognition. Unlike @cite_15 @cite_18 which used a single character classifier, @cite_4 combined a binary text no-text classifier, a character classifier and a bi-gram classifier to compute scores for candidate words in a fixed lexicon. To recognise text without a lexicon, a structured output loss was used in their extended work @cite_26 to optimize the individual character and @math -gram predictors.