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

Real-time Arabic scene text detection using fully convolutional neural networks

The aim of this research is to propose a fully convolutional approach to address the problem of real-time scene text detection for Arabic language. Text detection is performed using a two-steps multi-scale approach. The first step uses light-weighted fully convolutional network: TextBlockDetector FCN, an adaptation of VGG-16 to eliminate non-textual elements, localize wide scale text and give text scale estimation. The second step determines narrow scale range of text using fully convolutional network for maximum performance. To evaluate the system, we confront the results of the framework to the results obtained with single VGG-16 fully deployed for text detection in one-shot; in addition to previous results in the state-of-the-art. For training and testing, we initiate a dataset of 575 images manually processed along with data augmentation to enrich training process. The system scores a precision of 0.651 vs 0.64 in the state-of-the-art and a FPS of 24.3 vs 31.7 for a VGG-16 fully deployed