Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition

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

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

STEFANN: Scene Text Editor using Font Adaptive Neural Network

Textual information in a captured scene plays an important role in scene interpretation and decision making. Though there exist methods that can successfully detect and interpret complex text regions present in a scene, to the best of our knowledge, there is no significant prior work that aims to modify the textual information in an image. The ability to edit text directly on images has several advantages including error correction, text restoration and image reusability. In this paper, we propose a method to modify text in an image at character-level. We approach the problem in two stages. At first, the unobserved character (target) is generated from an observed character (source) being modified. We propose two different neural network architectures - (a) FANnet to achieve structural consistency with source font and (b) Colornet to preserve source color. Next, we replace the source character with the generated character maintaining both geometric and visual consistency with neighboring characters. Our method works as a unified platform for modifying text in images. We present the effectiveness of our method on COCO-Text and ICDAR datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively.Comment: Accepted in The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 202

Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition

Recognizing irregular text in natural scene images is challenging due to the large variance in text appearance, such as curvature, orientation and distortion. Most existing approaches rely heavily on sophisticated model designs and/or extra fine-grained annotations, which, to some extent, increase the difficulty in algorithm implementation and data collection. In this work, we propose an easy-to-implement strong baseline for irregular scene text recognition, using off-the-shelf neural network components and only word-level annotations. It is composed of a $31$-layer ResNet, an LSTM-based encoder-decoder framework and a 2-dimensional attention module. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method is robust and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both regular and irregular scene text recognition benchmarks. Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/ShowAttendReadComment: Accepted to Proc. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 201