Recognizing irregular text in natural scene images is challenging due to the large variance in text appearance, such as curvature, orientation and distortion. Most existing approaches rely heavily on sophisticated model designs and or extra fine-grained annotations, which, to some extent, increase the difficulty in algorithm implementation and data collection. In this work, we propose an easy-to-implement strong baseline for irregular scene text recognition, using off-the-shelf neural network components and only word-level annotations. It is composed of a @math -layer ResNet, an LSTM-based encoder-decoder framework and a 2-dimensional attention module. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method is robust and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both regular and irregular scene text recognition benchmarks. The code will be released.
@cite_18: In this work we present an end-to-end system for text spotting--localising and recognising text in natural scene images--and text based image retrieval. This system is based on a region proposal mechanism for detection and deep convolutional neural networks for recognition. Our pipeline uses a novel combination of complementary proposal generation techniques to ensure high recall, and a fast subsequent filtering stage for improving precision. For the recognition and ranking of proposals, we train very large convolutional neural networks to perform word recognition on the whole proposal region at the same time, departing from the character classifier based systems of the past. These networks are trained solely on data produced by a synthetic text generation engine, requiring no human labelled data. Analysing the stages of our pipeline, we show state-of-the-art performance throughout. We perform rigorous experiments across a number of standard end-to-end text spotting benchmarks and text-based image retrieval datasets, showing a large improvement over all previous methods. Finally, we demonstrate a real-world application of our text spotting system to allow thousands of hours of news footage to be instantly searchable via a text query.
@cite_4: 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_2: This paper presents an approach to text recognition in natural scene images. Unlike most existing works which assume that texts are horizontal and frontal parallel to the image plane, our method is able to recognize perspective texts of arbitrary orientations. For individual character recognition, we adopt a bag-of-key points approach, in which Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors are extracted densely and quantized using a pre-trained vocabulary. Following [1, 2], the context information is utilized through lexicons. We formulate word recognition as finding the optimal alignment between the set of characters and the list of lexicon words. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset called StreetViewText-Perspective, which contains texts in street images with a great variety of viewpoints. Experimental results on public datasets and the proposed dataset show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on perspective texts of arbitrary orientations.
@cite_5: 
@cite_17: 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.
Early work Scene text recognition has drawn lots of attentions during recent years and made significant progress in performance. Early approaches mainly work in a fashion @cite_4 @cite_5 @cite_2 @cite_17 , in which individual characters are detected firstly via sliding window or connected components, and then integrated into a word by dynamic programming or graph models. Character detection or separation by itself, however, is not a completely-solved problem due to complicated background or cursive fonts. Alternatively, @cite_18 considered text recognition as a multi-class classification problem, which assigned a distinct label to each word in a @math k-sized dictionary. Apparently, it is difficult to extend the approach to words out of the dictionary.