Scene text recognition has received increased attention in the research community. Text in the wild often possesses irregular arrangements, typically including perspective text, curved text, oriented text. Most existing methods are hard to work well for irregular text, especially for severely distorted text. In this paper, we propose a novel Recurrent Calibration Network (RCN) for irregular scene text recognition. The RCN progressively calibrates the irregular text to boost the recognition performance. By decomposing the calibration process into multiple steps, the irregular text can be calibrated to normal one step by step. Besides, in order to avoid the accumulation of lost information caused by inaccurate transformation, we further design a fiducial-point refinement structure to keep the integrity of text during the recurrent process. Instead of the calibrated images, the coordinates of fiducial points are tracked and refined, which implicitly models the transformation information. Based on the refined fiducial points, we estimate the transformation parameters and sample from the original image at each step. In this way, the original character information is preserved until the final transformation. Such designs lead to optimal calibration results to boost the performance of succeeding recognition. Extensive experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, especially on irregular benchmarks.
With the successful application of recurrent neural network (RNN) in sequence recognition, some researchers @cite_1 @cite_5 @cite_6 @cite_21 developed sequence-based methods and combined convolutional neural network (CNN) and RNN to encode the feature representations of word images. Shi @cite_1 and He @cite_5 both used the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) @cite_14 loss to calculate the conditional probabilities between the outputs of RNN and the target sequences. After that, Shi @cite_6 and Li @cite_21 introduced an attention mechanism to adaptively weight the features and select the most relevant feature representations in RNN-based decoder. In order to eliminate attention drift problem, Cheng @cite_8 employed a focusing attention mechanism to automatically adjust the attention weights. Bai @cite_28 proposed the edit probability to estimate the probability of generating a string while considering possible occurrences of missing or superfluous characters. Although these approaches have shown promising results, they cannot effectively handle with the irregular text. The main reason is that word images are encoded into 1D feature sequences, but the irregular text is not horizontally arranged.
@cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_5
2009444210 2754586843 2347817542 2808523546
Recurrent neural networks (RNN) have been successfully applied for recognition of cursive handwritten documents, both in English and Arabic scripts. Ability of RNNs to model context in sequence data like speech and text makes them a suitable candidate to develop OCR systems for printed Nabataean scripts (including Nastaleeq for which no OCR system is available to date). In this work, we have presented the results of applying RNN to printed Urdu text in Nastaleeq script. Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BLSTM) architecture with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) output layer was employed to recognize printed Urdu text. We evaluated BLSTM networks for two cases: one ignoring the character's shape variations and the second is considering them. The recognition error rate at character level for first case is 5.15 and for the second is 13.6 . These results were obtained on synthetically generated UPTI dataset containing artificially degraded images to reflect some real-world scanning artifacts along with clean images. Comparison with shape-matching based method is also presented. Recurrent neural nets (RNN) and convolutional neural nets (CNN) are widely used on NLP tasks to capture the long-term and local dependencies, respectively. Attention mechanisms have recently attracted enormous interest due to their highly parallelizable computation, significantly less training time, and flexibility in modeling dependencies. We propose a novel attention mechanism in which the attention between elements from input sequence(s) is directional and multi-dimensional (i.e., feature-wise). A light-weight neural net, "Directional Self-Attention Network (DiSAN)", is then proposed to learn sentence embedding, based solely on the proposed attention without any RNN CNN structure. DiSAN is only composed of a directional self-attention with temporal order encoded, followed by a multi-dimensional attention that compresses the sequence into a vector representation. Despite its simple form, DiSAN outperforms complicated RNN models on both prediction quality and time efficiency. It achieves the best test accuracy among all sentence encoding methods and improves the most recent best result by 1.02 on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, and shows state-of-the-art test accuracy on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST), Multi-Genre natural language inference (MultiNLI), Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK), Customer Review, MPQA, TREC question-type classification and Subjectivity (SUBJ) datasets. In this paper, we investigate the use of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in the context of search-based online advertising. We use RNNs to map both queries and ads to real valued vectors, with which the relevance of a given (query, ad) pair can be easily computed. On top of the RNN, we propose a novel attention network, which learns to assign attention scores to different word locations according to their intent importance (hence the name DeepIntent). The vector output of a sequence is thus computed by a weighted sum of the hidden states of the RNN at each word according their attention scores. We perform end-to-end training of both the RNN and attention network under the guidance of user click logs, which are sampled from a commercial search engine. We show that in most cases the attention network improves the quality of learned vector representations, evaluated by AUC on a manually labeled dataset. Moreover, we highlight the effectiveness of the learned attention scores from two aspects: query rewriting and a modified BM25 metric. We show that using the learned attention scores, one is able to produce sub-queries that are of better qualities than those of the state-of-the-art methods. Also, by modifying the term frequency with the attention scores in a standard BM25 formula, one is able to improve its performance evaluated by AUC. This paper proposes an effective segmentation-free approach using a hybrid neural network hidden Markov model (NN-HMM) for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). In the general Bayesian framework, the handwritten Chinese text line is sequentially modeled by HMMs with each representing one character class, while the NN-based classifier is adopted to calculate the posterior probability of all HMM states. The key issues in feature extraction, character modeling, and language modeling are comprehensively investigated to show the effectiveness of NN-HMM framework for offline HCTR. First, a conventional deep neural network (DNN) architecture is studied with a well-designed feature extractor. As for the training procedure, the label refinement using forced alignment and the sequence training can yield significant gains on top of the frame-level cross-entropy criterion. Second, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with automatically learned discriminative features demonstrates its superiority to DNN in the HMM framework. Moreover, to solve the challenging problem of distinguishing quite confusing classes due to the large vocabulary of Chinese characters, NN-based classifier should output 19900 HMM states as the classification units via a high-resolution modeling within each character. On the ICDAR 2013 competition task of CASIA-HWDB database, DNN-HMM yields a promising character error rate (CER) of 5.24 by making a good trade-off between the computational complexity and recognition accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, DCNN-HMM can achieve a best published CER of 3.53 .