Decoupled Attention Network for Text Recognition

Scene text detection and recognition are vital challenging tasks in computer vision, which are to detect and recognize sequences of texts in natural scenes. Recently, researchers have investigated a lot of state-of-the-art methods to improve the accuracy and efficiency of text detection and recognition. However, there has been little research on text detection and recognition in natural scenes in Vietnam. In this paper, a deep learning-based empirical investigation of Vietnamese scene text detection and recognition is presented. Firstly, four detection models including differentiable binarization network (DBN), pyramid mask text detector (PMTD), pixel aggregation network (PAN), and Fourier contour embedding network (FCEN), are employed to detect text regions from the images. Then, four text recognition models including convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN), self-attention text recognition network (SATRN), no-recurrence sequence-to-sequence text recognizer (NRTR), and RobustScanner (RS) are also investigated to recognize the texts. Moreover, data augmentation methods are also applied to enrich data for improving the accuracy and enhancing the performance of scene text detection and recognition. To validate the effectiveness of scene text detection and recognition models, the VinText dataset is employed for evaluation. Empirical results show that PMTD and SATRN achieve the highest scores among the others for text detection and recognition, respectively. For knowledge-sharing, our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/ThorPham/VN_scene_text_detection_recognition.

Text detection and recognition in scene images and videos attract much attention in computer vision recently. However, most existing text detection and recognition methods only focus on static images. In this paper an end-to-end scene text recognition method based on multi frame tracking is proposed for text in videos, in which temporal information is employed to improve performance. First, an end-to-end text recognition method based on a unified deep neural network is used to detect and recognize text in each frame of the input video. Then, multi frame text tracking is employed through associations of texts in current frame and several previous frames to obtain final results. Experiments on ICDAR datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in end-to-end video text recognition.

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 Arabic text images from a large vocabulary of Arabic words and phrases. Our implementation is built on top of the model introduced here [37] which is proven quite effective for English scene text recognition. The model follows a segmentation-free, sequence to sequence transcription approach. The network transcribes a sequence of convolutional features from the input image to a sequence of target labels. This does away with the need for segmenting input image into constituent characters/glyphs, which is often difficult for Arabic script. Further, the ability of RNNs to model contextual dependencies yields superior recognition results.

Hierarchical visual-semantic interaction for scene text recognition

Scene texts refer to arbitrary text found in images captured by cameras in real-world settings. The tasks of text detection and recognition are critical components of computer vision, with applications spanning scene understanding, information retrieval, robotics, and autonomous driving. Despite significant advancements in deep learning methods, achieving accurate text detection and recognition in complex images remains a formidable challenge for robust real-world applications. Several factors contribute to these challenges. First, the diversity of text shapes, fonts, colors, and styles complicates detection efforts. Second, the myriad combinations of characters, often with unstable attributes, make complete detection difficult, especially when background interruptions obscure character strokes and shapes. Finally, effective coordination of multiple sub-tasks in end-to-end learning is essential for success. This research aimed to tackle these challenges by enhancing text discriminative representation. This study focused on two interconnected problems: Scene Text Recognition (STR), which involves recognizing text from scene images, and Scene Text Detection (STD), which entails simultaneously detecting and recognizing multiple texts within those images. This research focuses on implementing and evaluating the Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector (EAST) algorithm for text detection and recognition in natural scene images. The study aims to compare the performance of three prominent Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques—TesseractOCR, PaddleOCR, and EasyOCR. The EAST model was applied to a series of sample test images, and the results were visually represented with bounding boxes highlighting the detected text regions. The inference times for each image were recorded, highlighting the algorithm's efficiency, with average times of 0.446, 0.439, and 0.440 seconds for the respective test images. These results indicate that the EAST algorithm is accurate and operates in real-time, making it suitable for applications requiring immediate text recognition.

Scene text recognition (STR) involves reading text from images of natural scenes. The texts in such images come in a wide array of fonts, shapes, and orientations. Therefore, various works often rely on rectification network to rectify text images before passing them to the recognition network. However, rectifying an image that does not require it may create unwanted distortion. This may result in wrong predictions that would have otherwise been correct. In order to alleviate the adverse impact of rectification, a portmanteauing of features is presented. The method is introduced to a transformer-based model through a proposed block matrix initialisation which achieved competitive results. Although transformer has achieved notable success in various fields, areas for improvements with its application in STR were identified in this study. Firstly, vision transformer requires an input image to be resized into fixed height and width before being split into patches. However, it was discovered that certain patch resolutions seem to result in better accuracy for images with particular original aspect ratios. Secondly, the first decoded character generally has lower accuracy. In view of these issues, pure transformer with integrated experts (PTIE) is proposed. PTIE is able to process multiple patch resolutions and decode in both the original and reverse character orders thereby capitalising on the aforementioned areas and achieved state-of-the-art results. Handwritten text recognition (HTR) deals with handwritten text images that come from scanned or photograph documents. Works that employed transformer-based models often train them with additional synthetic data. However, these data are not publicly available. Furthermore, experimentation in this study seems to suggest that transformer trained on real HTR data generalises poorly to unseen data. Therefore, in the scope of real data, a simple transformer model which outperformed related works is presented in this thesis. This is achieved by adopting attention masking which addressed the issue of generalisation as well as introducing various pre-processing methods.

In this paper, we present a DAV-based system for text (mainly English and Chinese) detection and recognition. With the combination of unmanned aerial vehicle and scene text recognition, the system can realize text detection and recognition in long-range air-plane images, providing an underlay for unmanned navigation and fast text information understanding. Robust text detection and accurate text recognition can be achieved by two contributions. First, a scalable engine is proposed to synthesize text images by overlaying English or Chinese text into existing images in a natural way. Second, an framework which is trainable and end-to-end by combining Convolutional Neural Network and Recurrent Neural Network is adapted to recognize the variable-length text with a high accuracy. Field experiments are performed with different videos shot in various backgrounds and outdoors to show that the proposed system can detect and recognise text information in UAV imagery robustly and effectively.

Text recognition in the wild is a challenging task in the field of computer vision and machine learning. Existing optical character recognition engines cannot perform well in the natural scene. In this context, deep learning models have emerged as a powerful state-of-the-art technique in the classification and recognition process. This study proposes a new Convolutional Neural Network based system for scene text reading. We investigate how to combine the character recognition module followed by the word recognition module to achieve the overall system goal. The first module analyzes characters within multi-scale images by relaying on the power of the convolutional network and the fully connected network for character recognition. The second module relies on the Viterbi search to find the closest word to a given characters sequence. For the sake of more precision, a bigram based linguistic module is applied. The proposed system achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three standard scene text recognition benchmarks: chars74k, ICDAR 2003 and ICDAR 2013. In particular, this performance is proven on both of character and word recognition accuracy as well as speed aspects via a comparative study between different deep learning architectures.

An extended attention mechanism for scene text recognition

Scene Text Recognition (STR) has become a popular and long-standing research problem in computer vision communities. Almost all the existing approaches mainly adopt the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) technique. However, these existing approaches are not much effective for irregular STR. In this research article, we introduced a new encoder-decoder framework to identify both regular and irregular natural scene text, which is developed based on the transformer framework. The proposed framework is divided into four main modules: Image Transformation, Visual Feature Extraction (VFE), Encoder and Decoder. Firstly, we employ a Thin Plate Spline (TPS) transformation in the image transformation module to normalize the original input image to reduce the burden of subsequent feature extraction. Secondly, in the VFE module, we use ResNet as the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) backbone to retrieve text image features maps from the rectified word image. However, the VFE module generates one-dimensional feature maps that are not suitable for locating a multi-oriented text on two-dimensional word images. We proposed 2D Positional Encoding (2DPE) to preserve the sequential information. Thirdly, the feature aggregation and feature transformation are carried out simultaneously in the encoder module. We replace the original scaled dot-product attention model as in the standard transformer framework with an Optimal Adaptive Threshold-based Self-Attention (OATSA) model to filter noisy information effectively and focus on the most contributive text regions. Finally, we introduce a new architectural level bi-directional decoding approach in the decoder module to generate a more accurate character sequence. Eventually, We evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework in both horizontal and arbitrary text recognition through extensive experiments on seven public benchmarks including IIIT5K-Words, SVT, ICDAR 2003, ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2015, SVT-P and CUTE80 datasets. We also demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms most of the existing approaches by a substantial margin.

Blurred text recognition is a significant challenge in scene text recognition, especially in natural images where low resolution and blur hinder the extractor from capturing effective features. This paper proposes a similarity prior-guided super-resolution method for blurred text recognition, which enhances recognition performance by incorporating structure-aware similar character information and a dynamic attention mechanism. First, an initial prior is generated using a pretrained recognizer. Then, a similarity character set is constructed to produce similar text sequences, expanding the prior set. In addition, StyleGAN is employed to generate structural prior images, which serve as auxiliary information for the super-resolution process. A dynamic prior attention mechanism is introduced to adaptively fuse image features with multiple prior features, guiding the super- resolution network to more accurately reconstruct text structures. Furthermore, contrastive learning is used to optimize the model’s ability to distinguish correct priors from incorrect ones. Experiments conducted on the RealCE and ArchDegrade datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving a PSNR of 17.30 dB, SSIM of 0.6505, and recognition accuracies of 33.06% (TransformerOCR) and 54.27% (PP-OCRv3), outperforming several state-of-the-art super-resolution methods. These results verify both the recognition improvement and cross-domain generalization capabilities of our approach.

Scene text recognition has been widely investigated in computer vision. In the literature, the encoder-decoder based framework, which first encodes image into feature map and then decodes them into corresponding text sequences, have achieved great success. However, this solution fails in low-quality images, as the local visual features extracted from curved or blurred images are difficult to decode into corresponding text. To address this issue, we propose a new framework for Scene Text Recognition (STR), named Non-Local Attentional Scene Text Recognizer (NASTER). We use ResNet with Global Context Block (GC block) to extract global visual features. The global context information is then captured in parallel using the self-attention module and finally decoded by a multi-layer attention decoder with an intermediate supervision module. The proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performances on seven benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Scene text recognition is one of the most important techniques in pattern recognition and machine intelligence due to its numerous practical applications. Scene text recognition is also a sequence model task. Recurrent neural network (RNN) is commonly regarded as the default starting point for sequential models. Due to the non-parallel prediction and the gradient disappearance problem, the performance of the RNN is difficult to improve substantially. In this paper, a new TRDD network architecture which base on dilated convolution and residual block is proposed, using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) instead of RNN realizes the recognition task of sequence texts. Our model has the following three advantages in comparison to existing scene text recognition methods: First, the text recognition speed of the TRDD network is much fast than the state-of-the-art scene text recognition network based recurrent neural networks (RNN). Second, TRDD is easier to train, avoiding the problem of exploding and vanishing, which is major issue for RNN. Third, both using larger dilated factors and increasing the filter size are all viable ways to change receptive field size. We benchmark the TRDD on four standard datasets, it has higher recognition accuracy and faster recognition speed based on the smaller model. It is hopefully used in the real-time application.

<p>Text recognition task involves recognizing the text from the natural image; it possesses various application, which aids information extraction through data mining from street view like images. Scene text recognition involves two stages i.e., text detection and text recognition, in the past several mechanisms has been proposed for accurate identification, these mechanisms are either traditional approach or deep learning-based. All the existing deep-learning methodology fails as this comprises character data and image data, further this research develops an optimal architecture fusion neural network (FNN) for text identification and recognition. FNN comprises several layers of convolutional neural network as well as recurrent neural network. Within FNN architecture convolutional layer is utilized for the feature extraction and recurrent layer is utilized for attaining the feature classification prediction. Further, an optimal training architecture is established for the enhancement of classification accuracy. Here Devanagari MLT-19 dataset is utilized for the evaluation of FNN. Three different parameters are considered during evaluation i.e., script word identification, character recognition rate (CRR) and word recognition rate (WRR). Further comparison with existing models is performed to establish the proposed model efficiency and it shows FNN methodology observes 98.67% of script identification accuracy, 84.65% of WRR and 92.93% of CRR.</p>

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that conjointly address scene text detection and recognition by sharing convolutional feature map. Compared with most systems which consider text detection and recognition to be irrelevant tasks, we integrate text detection and recognition into an end-to-end trainable neural network based on convolutional and recurrent neural network It can precisely detect and recognize text during a simple forward propagation, avoiding redundant processes like image patch cropping, repeated calculation of feature map. We train this unified neural network just by images and corresponding ground truth bounding boxes and text labels. Our algorithm gains outstanding performance in terms of computation time and accuracy on standard benchmark datasets. The proposed model runs robustly on multi-ratios images without complicated post-processing steps.