33 research outputs found
Reading Scene Text in Deep Convolutional Sequences
We develop a Deep-Text Recurrent Network (DTRN) that regards scene text
reading as a sequence labelling problem. We leverage recent advances of deep
convolutional neural networks to generate an ordered high-level sequence from a
whole word image, avoiding the difficult character segmentation problem. Then a
deep recurrent model, building on long short-term memory (LSTM), is developed
to robustly recognize the generated CNN sequences, departing from most existing
approaches recognising each character independently. Our model has a number of
appealing properties in comparison to existing scene text recognition methods:
(i) It can recognise highly ambiguous words by leveraging meaningful context
information, allowing it to work reliably without either pre- or
post-processing; (ii) the deep CNN feature is robust to various image
distortions; (iii) it retains the explicit order information in word image,
which is essential to discriminate word strings; (iv) the model does not depend
on pre-defined dictionary, and it can process unknown words and arbitrary
strings. Codes for the DTRN will be available.Comment: To appear in the 13th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI-16), 201
AON: Towards Arbitrarily-Oriented Text Recognition
Recognizing text from natural images is a hot research topic in computer
vision due to its various applications. Despite the enduring research of
several decades on optical character recognition (OCR), recognizing texts from
natural images is still a challenging task. This is because scene texts are
often in irregular (e.g. curved, arbitrarily-oriented or seriously distorted)
arrangements, which have not yet been well addressed in the literature.
Existing methods on text recognition mainly work with regular (horizontal and
frontal) texts and cannot be trivially generalized to handle irregular texts.
In this paper, we develop the arbitrary orientation network (AON) to directly
capture the deep features of irregular texts, which are combined into an
attention-based decoder to generate character sequence. The whole network can
be trained end-to-end by using only images and word-level annotations.
Extensive experiments on various benchmarks, including the CUTE80,
SVT-Perspective, IIIT5k, SVT and ICDAR datasets, show that the proposed
AON-based method achieves the-state-of-the-art performance in irregular
datasets, and is comparable to major existing methods in regular datasets.Comment: Accepted by CVPR201
Inductive Visual Localisation: Factorised Training for Superior Generalisation
End-to-end trained Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been successfully
applied to numerous problems that require processing sequences, such as image
captioning, machine translation, and text recognition. However, RNNs often
struggle to generalise to sequences longer than the ones encountered during
training. In this work, we propose to optimise neural networks explicitly for
induction. The idea is to first decompose the problem in a sequence of
inductive steps and then to explicitly train the RNN to reproduce such steps.
Generalisation is achieved as the RNN is not allowed to learn an arbitrary
internal state; instead, it is tasked with mimicking the evolution of a valid
state. In particular, the state is restricted to a spatial memory map that
tracks parts of the input image which have been accounted for in previous
steps. The RNN is trained for single inductive steps, where it produces updates
to the memory in addition to the desired output. We evaluate our method on two
different visual recognition problems involving visual sequences: (1) text
spotting, i.e. joint localisation and reading of text in images containing
multiple lines (or a block) of text, and (2) sequential counting of objects in
aerial images. We show that inductive training of recurrent models enhances
their generalisation ability on challenging image datasets.Comment: In BMVC 2018 (spotlight