Recognizing text in the wild is a really challenging task because of complex backgrounds, various illuminations and diverse distortions, even with deep neural networks (convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks). In the end-to-end training procedure for scene text recognition, the outputs of deep neural networks at different iterations are always demonstrated with diversity and complementarity for the target object (text). Here, a simple but effective deep learning method, an adaptive ensemble of deep neural networks (AdaDNNs), is proposed to simply select and adaptively combine classifier components at different iterations from the whole learning system. Furthermore, the ensemble is formulated as a Bayesian framework for classifier weighting and combination. A variety of experiments on several typical acknowledged benchmarks, i.e., ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (Challenge 1, 2 and 4) datasets, verify the surprised improvement from the baseline DNNs, and the effectiveness of AdaDNNs compared with the recent state-of-the-art methods.
This paper addresses the problems of word spotting and word recognition on images. In word spotting, the goal is to find all instances of a query word in a dataset of images. In recognition, the goal is to recognize the content of the word image, usually aided by a dictionary or lexicon. We describe an approach in which both word images and text strings are embedded in a common vectorial subspace. This is achieved by a combination of label embedding and attributes learning, and a common subspace regression. In this subspace, images and strings that represent the same word are close together, allowing one to cast recognition and retrieval tasks as a nearest neighbor problem. Contrary to most other existing methods, our representation has a fixed length, is low dimensional, and is very fast to compute and, especially, to compare. We test our approach on four public datasets of both handwritten documents and natural images showing results comparable or better than the state-of-the-art on spotting and recognition tasks. 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. There are many historical manuscripts written in a single hand which it would be useful to index. Examples include the W.B. DuBois collection at the University of Massachusetts and the early Presidential libraries at the Library of Congress. Since Optical Character Recognition (OCR) does not work well on handwriting, an alternative scheme based on matching the images of the words is proposed for indexing such texts. The current paper deals with the matching aspects of this process. Two different techniques for matching words are discussed. The first method matches words assuming that the transformation between the words may be modelled by a translation (shift). The second method matches words assuming that the transformation between the words may be modelled by an affine transform. Experiments are shown demonstrating the feasibility of the approach for indexing handwriting. The method should also be applicable to retrieving previously stored material from personal digital assistants (PDAs). This paper addresses the problem of learning word image representations: given the cropped image of a word, we are interested in finding a descriptive, robust, and compact fixed-length representation. Machine learning techniques can then be supplied with these representations to produce models useful for word retrieval or recognition tasks. Although many works have focused on the machine learning aspect once a global representation has been produced, little work has been devoted to the construction of those base image representations: most works use standard coding and aggregation techniques directly on top of standard computer vision features such as SIFT or HOG. We propose to learn local mid-level features suitable for building word image representations. These features are learnt by leveraging character bounding box annotations on a small set of training images. However, contrary to other approaches that use character bounding box information, our approach does not rely on detecting the individual characters explicitly at testing time. Our local mid-level features can then be aggregated to produce a global word image signature. When pairing these features with the recent word attributes framework of Almaz ', we obtain results comparable with or better than the state-of-the-art on matching and recognition tasks using global descriptors of only 96 dimensions. We present a method for spotting words in the wild, i.e., in real images taken in unconstrained environments. Text found in the wild has a surprising range of difficulty. At one end of the spectrum, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) applied to scanned pages of well formatted printed text is one of the most successful applications of computer vision to date. At the other extreme lie visual CAPTCHAs - text that is constructed explicitly to fool computer vision algorithms. Both tasks involve recognizing text, yet one is nearly solved while the other remains extremely challenging. In this work, we argue that the appearance of words in the wild spans this range of difficulties and propose a new word recognition approach based on state-of-the-art methods from generic object recognition, in which we consider object categories to be the words themselves. We compare performance of leading OCR engines - one open source and one proprietary - with our new approach on the ICDAR Robust Reading data set and a new word spotting data set we introduce in this paper: the Street View Text data set. We show improvements of up to 16 on the data sets, demonstrating the feasibility of a new approach to a seemingly old problem. In this work we present a framework for the recognition of natural scene text. Our framework does not require any human-labelled data, and performs word recognition on the whole image holistically, departing from the character based recognition systems of the past. The deep neural network models at the centre of this framework are trained solely on data produced by a synthetic text generation engine -- synthetic data that is highly realistic and sufficient to replace real data, giving us infinite amounts of training data. This excess of data exposes new possibilities for word recognition models, and here we consider three models, each one "reading" words in a different way: via 90k-way dictionary encoding, character sequence encoding, and bag-of-N-grams encoding. In the scenarios of language based and completely unconstrained text recognition we greatly improve upon state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets, using our fast, simple machinery and requiring zero data-acquisition costs. Image-based sequence recognition has been a long-standing research topic in computer vision. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text recognition, which is among the most important and challenging tasks in image-based sequence recognition. A novel neural network architecture, which integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a unified framework, is proposed. Compared with previous systems for scene text recognition, the proposed architecture possesses four distinctive properties: (1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most of the existing algorithms whose components are separately trained and tuned. (2) It naturally handles sequences in arbitrary lengths, involving no character segmentation or horizontal scale normalization. (3) It is not confined to any predefined lexicon and achieves remarkable performances in both lexicon-free and lexicon-based scene text recognition tasks. (4) It generates an effective yet much smaller model, which is more practical for real-world application scenarios. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K, Street View Text and ICDAR datasets, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the prior arts. Moreover, the proposed algorithm performs well in the task of image-based music score recognition, which evidently verifies the generality of it.