1,303 research outputs found
Unconstrained Scene Text and Video Text Recognition for Arabic Script
Building robust recognizers for Arabic has always been challenging. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of an end-to-end trainable CNN-RNN hybrid
architecture in recognizing Arabic text in videos and natural scenes. We
outperform previous state-of-the-art on two publicly available video text
datasets - ALIF and ACTIV. For the scene text recognition task, we introduce a
new Arabic scene text dataset and establish baseline results. For scripts like
Arabic, a major challenge in developing robust recognizers is the lack of large
quantity of annotated data. We overcome this by synthesising millions of Arabic
text images from a large vocabulary of Arabic words and phrases. Our
implementation is built on top of the model introduced here [37] which is
proven quite effective for English scene text recognition. The model follows a
segmentation-free, sequence to sequence transcription approach. The network
transcribes a sequence of convolutional features from the input image to a
sequence of target labels. This does away with the need for segmenting input
image into constituent characters/glyphs, which is often difficult for Arabic
script. Further, the ability of RNNs to model contextual dependencies yields
superior recognition results.Comment: 5 page
Learning Spatial-Semantic Context with Fully Convolutional Recurrent Network for Online Handwritten Chinese Text Recognition
Online handwritten Chinese text recognition (OHCTR) is a challenging problem
as it involves a large-scale character set, ambiguous segmentation, and
variable-length input sequences. In this paper, we exploit the outstanding
capability of path signature to translate online pen-tip trajectories into
informative signature feature maps using a sliding window-based method,
successfully capturing the analytic and geometric properties of pen strokes
with strong local invariance and robustness. A multi-spatial-context fully
convolutional recurrent network (MCFCRN) is proposed to exploit the multiple
spatial contexts from the signature feature maps and generate a prediction
sequence while completely avoiding the difficult segmentation problem.
Furthermore, an implicit language model is developed to make predictions based
on semantic context within a predicting feature sequence, providing a new
perspective for incorporating lexicon constraints and prior knowledge about a
certain language in the recognition procedure. Experiments on two standard
benchmarks, Dataset-CASIA and Dataset-ICDAR, yielded outstanding results, with
correct rates of 97.10% and 97.15%, respectively, which are significantly
better than the best result reported thus far in the literature.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure
Arabic cursive text recognition from natural scene images
© 2019 by the authors. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on Arabic cursive scene text recognition. The recent years' publications in this field have witnessed the interest shift of document image analysis researchers from recognition of optical characters to recognition of characters appearing in natural images. Scene text recognition is a challenging problem due to the text having variations in font styles, size, alignment, orientation, reflection, illumination change, blurriness and complex background. Among cursive scripts, Arabic scene text recognition is contemplated as a more challenging problem due to joined writing, same character variations, a large number of ligatures, the number of baselines, etc. Surveys on the Latin and Chinese script-based scene text recognition system can be found, but the Arabic like scene text recognition problem is yet to be addressed in detail. In this manuscript, a description is provided to highlight some of the latest techniques presented for text classification. The presented techniques following a deep learning architecture are equally suitable for the development of Arabic cursive scene text recognition systems. The issues pertaining to text localization and feature extraction are also presented. Moreover, this article emphasizes the importance of having benchmark cursive scene text dataset. Based on the discussion, future directions are outlined, some of which may provide insight about cursive scene text to researchers
Text detection and recognition in natural scene images
This thesis addresses the problem of end-to-end text detection and recognition in
natural scene images based on deep neural networks. Scene text detection and recognition
aim to find regions in an image that are considered as text by human beings,
generate a bounding box for each word and output a corresponding sequence of
characters. As a useful task in image analysis, scene text detection and recognition
attract much attention in computer vision field. In this thesis, we tackle this problem
by taking advantage of the success in deep learning techniques.
Car license plates can be viewed as a spacial case of scene text, as they both consist
of characters and appear in natural scenes. Nevertheless, they have their respective
specificities. During the research progress, we start from car license plate detection
and recognition. Then we extend the methods to general scene text, with additional
ideas proposed.
For both tasks, we develop two approaches respectively: a stepwise one and
an integrated one. Stepwise methods tackle text detection and recognition step by
step by respective models; while integrated methods handle both text detection and
recognition simultaneously via one model. All approaches are based on the powerful
deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks
(RNNs), considering the tremendous breakthroughs they brought into the computer
vision community.
To begin with, a stepwise framework is proposed to tackle text detection and
recognition, with its application to car license plates and general scene text respectively.
A character CNN classifier is well trained to detect characters from an image
in a sliding window manner. The detected characters are then grouped together as
license plates or text lines according to some heuristic rules. A sequence labeling
based method is proposed to recognize the whole license plate or text line without
character level segmentation.
On the basis of the sequence labeling based recognition method, to accelerate the
processing speed, an integrated deep neural network is then proposed to address
car license plate detection and recognition concurrently. It integrates both CNNs
and RNNs in one network, and can be trained end-to-end. Both car license plate
bounding boxes and their labels are generated in a single forward evaluation of the
network. The whole process involves no heuristic rule, and avoids intermediate
procedures like image cropping or feature recalculation, which not only prevents
error accumulation, but also reduces computation burden.
Lastly, the unified network is extended to simultaneous general text detection and
recognition in natural scene. In contrast to the one for car license plates, some innovations
are proposed to accommodate the special characteristics of general text. A
varying-size RoI encoding method is proposed to handle the various aspect ratios of general text. An attention-based sequence-to-sequence learning structure is adopted
for word recognition. It is expected that a character-level language model can be
learnt in this manner. The whole framework can be trained end-to-end, requiring
only images, the ground-truth bounding boxes and text labels. Through end-to-end
training, the learned features can be more discriminative, which improves the overall
performance. The convolutional features are calculated only once and shared by both
detection and recognition, which saves the processing time. The proposed method
has achieved state-of-the-art performance on several standard benchmark datasets.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201
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