6,515 research outputs found
A fine-grained approach to scene text script identification
This paper focuses on the problem of script identification in unconstrained
scenarios. Script identification is an important prerequisite to recognition,
and an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems
designed for multi-language environments. Although widely studied for document
images and handwritten documents, it remains an almost unexplored territory for
scene text images.
We detail a novel method for script identification in natural images that
combines convolutional features and the Naive-Bayes Nearest Neighbor
classifier. The proposed framework efficiently exploits the discriminative
power of small stroke-parts, in a fine-grained classification framework.
In addition, we propose a new public benchmark dataset for the evaluation of
joint text detection and script identification in natural scenes. Experiments
done in this new dataset demonstrate that the proposed method yields state of
the art results, while it generalizes well to different datasets and variable
number of scripts. The evidence provided shows that multi-lingual scene text
recognition in the wild is a viable proposition. Source code of the proposed
method is made available online
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
Speeding up Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Rank Expansions
The focus of this paper is speeding up the evaluation of convolutional neural
networks. While delivering impressive results across a range of computer vision
and machine learning tasks, these networks are computationally demanding,
limiting their deployability. Convolutional layers generally consume the bulk
of the processing time, and so in this work we present two simple schemes for
drastically speeding up these layers. This is achieved by exploiting
cross-channel or filter redundancy to construct a low rank basis of filters
that are rank-1 in the spatial domain. Our methods are architecture agnostic,
and can be easily applied to existing CPU and GPU convolutional frameworks for
tuneable speedup performance. We demonstrate this with a real world network
designed for scene text character recognition, showing a possible 2.5x speedup
with no loss in accuracy, and 4.5x speedup with less than 1% drop in accuracy,
still achieving state-of-the-art on standard benchmarks
Ambient Sound Provides Supervision for Visual Learning
The sound of crashing waves, the roar of fast-moving cars -- sound conveys
important information about the objects in our surroundings. In this work, we
show that ambient sounds can be used as a supervisory signal for learning
visual models. To demonstrate this, we train a convolutional neural network to
predict a statistical summary of the sound associated with a video frame. We
show that, through this process, the network learns a representation that
conveys information about objects and scenes. We evaluate this representation
on several recognition tasks, finding that its performance is comparable to
that of other state-of-the-art unsupervised learning methods. Finally, we show
through visualizations that the network learns units that are selective to
objects that are often associated with characteristic sounds.Comment: ECCV 201
Rotation-invariant features for multi-oriented text detection in natural images.
Texts in natural scenes carry rich semantic information, which can be used to assist a wide range of applications, such as object recognition, image/video retrieval, mapping/navigation, and human computer interaction. However, most existing systems are designed to detect and recognize horizontal (or near-horizontal) texts. Due to the increasing popularity of mobile-computing devices and applications, detecting texts of varying orientations from natural images under less controlled conditions has become an important but challenging task. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to detect texts of varying orientations. Our algorithm is based on a two-level classification scheme and two sets of features specially designed for capturing the intrinsic characteristics of texts. To better evaluate the proposed method and compare it with the competing algorithms, we generate a comprehensive dataset with various types of texts in diverse real-world scenes. We also propose a new evaluation protocol, which is more suitable for benchmarking algorithms for detecting texts in varying orientations. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our system compares favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms when handling horizontal texts and achieves significantly enhanced performance on variant texts in complex natural scenes
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