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 feature vectors according to the learned attention model. Training can be done end-to-end using only word level annotations. In addition, we show that modifying the beam search algorithm by integrating an explicit language model leads to significantly better recognition results. We validate the performance of our approach on standard SVT and ICDAR'03 scene text datasets, showing state-of-the-art performance in unconstrained text recognition.
Dictionary-based scene text recognition. Traditionally, scene text recognition systems use character recognizers in a sequential way by localizing characters using a sliding window @cite_19 @cite_16 @cite_5 and then grouping responses by arranging the character windows from left to right as words. A variety of techniques have been used to classify character bounding boxes, including random ferns @cite_5 , integer programming @cite_17 and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) @cite_19 . These methods often use the lexical constrains imposed by a fixed lexicon while grouping the character hypotheses into words.
@cite_19 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_17
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We propose a system that finds text in natural scenes using a variety of cues. Our novel data-driven method incorporates coarse-to-fine detection of character pixels using convolutional features (Text-Conv), followed by extracting connected components (CCs) from characters using edge and color features, and finally performing a graph-based segmentation of CCs into words (Word-Graph). For Text-Conv, the initial detection is based on convolutional feature maps similar to those used in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), but learned using Convolutional k-means. Convolution masks defined by local and neighboring patch features are used to improve detection accuracy. The Word-Graph algorithm uses contextual information to both improve word segmentation and prune false character word detections. Different definitions for foreground (text) regions are used to train the detection stages, some based on bounding box intersection, and others on bounding box and pixel intersection. Our system obtains pixel, character, and word detection f-measures of 93.14 , 90.26 , and 86.77 respectively for the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Focused Scene Text dataset, out-performing state-of-the-art systems. This approach may work for other detection targets with homogenous color in natural scenes. Scene text recognition has attracted great interests from the computer vision and pattern recognition community in recent years. State-of-the-art methods use concolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory (RNN-LSTM) or the combination of them. In this paper, we investigate the intrinsic characteristics of text recognition, and inspired by human cognition mechanisms in reading texts, we propose a scene text recognition method with character models on convolutional feature map. The method simultaneously detects and recognizes characters by sliding the text line image with character models, which are learned end-to-end on text line images labeled with text transcripts. The character classifier outputs on the sliding windows are normalized and decoded with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) based algorithm. Compared to previous methods, our method has a number of appealing properties: (1) It avoids the difficulty of character segmentation which hinders the performance of segmentation-based recognition methods; (2) The model can be trained simply and efficiently because it avoids gradient vanishing exploding in training RNN-LSTM based models; (3) It bases on character models trained free of lexicon, and can recognize unknown words. (4) The recognition process is highly parallel and enables fast recognition. Our experiments on several challenging English and Chinese benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K, SVT, ICDAR03 13 and TRW15 datasets, demonstrate that the proposed method yields superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while the model size is relatively small. Scene text recognition has inspired great interests from the computer vision community in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel scene text recognition method using part-based tree-structured character detection. Different from conventional multi-scale sliding window character detection strategy, which does not make use of the character-specific structure information, we use part-based tree-structure to model each type of character so as to detect and recognize the characters at the same time. While for word recognition, we build a Conditional Random Field model on the potential character locations to incorporate the detection scores, spatial constraints and linguistic knowledge into one framework. The final word recognition result is obtained by minimizing the cost function defined on the random field. Experimental results on a range of challenging public datasets (ICDAR 2003, ICDAR 2011, SVT) demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly both for character detection and word recognition. An unconstrained end-to-end text localization and recognition method is presented. The method introduces a novel approach for character detection and recognition which combines the advantages of sliding-window and connected component methods. Characters are detected and recognized as image regions which contain strokes of specific orientations in a specific relative position, where the strokes are efficiently detected by convolving the image gradient field with a set of oriented bar filters. Additionally, a novel character representation efficiently calculated from the values obtained in the stroke detection phase is introduced. The representation is robust to shift at the stroke level, which makes it less sensitive to intra-class variations and the noise induced by normalizing character size and positioning. The effectiveness of the representation is demonstrated by the results achieved in the classification of real-world characters using an euclidian nearest-neighbor classifier trained on synthetic data in a plain form. The method was evaluated on a standard dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art results in both text localization and recognition.