Transcribing content from structural images, e.g., writing notes from music
scores, is a challenging task as not only the content objects should be
recognized, but the internal structure should also be preserved. Existing image
recognition methods mainly work on images with simple content (e.g., text lines
with characters), but are not capable to identify ones with more complex
content (e.g., structured symbols), which often follow a fine-grained grammar.
To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical Spotlight Transcribing
Network (STN) framework followed by a two-stage "where-to-what" solution.
Specifically, we first decide "where-to-look" through a novel spotlight
mechanism to focus on different areas of the original image following its
structure. Then, we decide "what-to-write" by developing a GRU based network
with the spotlight areas for transcribing the content accordingly. Moreover, we
propose two implementations on the basis of STN, i.e., STNM and STNR, where the
spotlight movement follows the Markov property and Recurrent modeling,
respectively. We also design a reinforcement method to refine the framework by
self-improving the spotlight mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on
many structural image datasets, where the results clearly demonstrate the
effectiveness of STN framework.Comment: Accepted by KDD2018 Research Track. In proceedings of the 24th ACM
SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD'18