Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition

2 Nov 2018  ·  Hui Li, Peng Wang, Chunhua Shen, Guyu Zhang ·

Recognizing irregular text in natural scene images is challenging due to the large variance in text appearance, such as curvature, orientation and distortion. Most existing approaches rely heavily on sophisticated model designs and/or extra fine-grained annotations, which, to some extent, increase the difficulty in algorithm implementation and data collection. In this work, we propose an easy-to-implement strong baseline for irregular scene text recognition, using off-the-shelf neural network components and only word-level annotations. It is composed of a $31$-layer ResNet, an LSTM-based encoder-decoder framework and a 2-dimensional attention module. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method is robust and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both regular and irregular scene text recognition benchmarks. Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/ShowAttendRead

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Datasets


Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Scene Text Recognition ICDAR2013 SAR Accuracy 91.0 # 33
Scene Text Recognition ICDAR2015 SAR Accuracy 69.2 # 26
Scene Text Recognition SVT SAR Accuracy 84.5 # 31

Methods