28 research outputs found
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
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
EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector
Previous approaches for scene text detection have already achieved promising
performances across various benchmarks. However, they usually fall short when
dealing with challenging scenarios, even when equipped with deep neural network
models, because the overall performance is determined by the interplay of
multiple stages and components in the pipelines. In this work, we propose a
simple yet powerful pipeline that yields fast and accurate text detection in
natural scenes. The pipeline directly predicts words or text lines of arbitrary
orientations and quadrilateral shapes in full images, eliminating unnecessary
intermediate steps (e.g., candidate aggregation and word partitioning), with a
single neural network. The simplicity of our pipeline allows concentrating
efforts on designing loss functions and neural network architecture.
Experiments on standard datasets including ICDAR 2015, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500
demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms
state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. On the ICDAR
2015 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves an F-score of 0.7820 at 13.2fps
at 720p resolution.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2017, fix equation (3
Learning to Read by Spelling: Towards Unsupervised Text Recognition
This work presents a method for visual text recognition without using any
paired supervisory data. We formulate the text recognition task as one of
aligning the conditional distribution of strings predicted from given text
images, with lexically valid strings sampled from target corpora. This enables
fully automated, and unsupervised learning from just line-level text-images,
and unpaired text-string samples, obviating the need for large aligned
datasets. We present detailed analysis for various aspects of the proposed
method, namely - (1) impact of the length of training sequences on convergence,
(2) relation between character frequencies and the order in which they are
learnt, (3) generalisation ability of our recognition network to inputs of
arbitrary lengths, and (4) impact of varying the text corpus on recognition
accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate excellent text recognition accuracy on both
synthetically generated text images, and scanned images of real printed books,
using no labelled training examples