Degraded images commonly exist in the general sources of character images,
leading to unsatisfactory character recognition results. Existing methods have
dedicated efforts to restoring degraded character images. However, the
denoising results obtained by these methods do not appear to improve character
recognition performance. This is mainly because current methods only focus on
pixel-level information and ignore critical features of a character, such as
its glyph, resulting in character-glyph damage during the denoising process. In
this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework based on glyph fusion and
attention mechanisms, i.e., CharFormer, for precisely recovering character
images without changing their inherent glyphs. Unlike existing frameworks,
CharFormer introduces a parallel target task for capturing additional
information and injecting it into the image denoising backbone, which will
maintain the consistency of character glyphs during character image denoising.
Moreover, we utilize attention-based networks for global-local feature
interaction, which will help to deal with blind denoising and enhance denoising
performance. We compare CharFormer with state-of-the-art methods on multiple
datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of CharFormer
quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 202