Recursive Recurrent Nets with Attention Modeling for OCR in the Wild
We present recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R2AM) for lexicon free optical character recognition in natural scene images. The primary advantages of the proposed method are: (1) use of recursive convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which allow for parametrically efficient and effective image feature extraction, (2) an implicitly learned character level language model, embodied in a recurrent neural network which avoids the need to use N grams, and (3) the use of a soft attention mechanism, allowing the model to selectively exploit image features in a coordinated way, and allowing for end to end training within a standard backpropagation framework. We validate our method with state of the art performance on challenging benchmark datasets: Street View Text, IIIT5k, ICDAR and Synth90k.
2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)