Research Area:  Machine Learning
Scene text with an irregular layout is difficult to recognize. To this end, a Sequential Transformation Attention-based Network (STAN), which comprises a sequential transformation network and an attention-based recognition network, is proposed for general scene text recognition. The sequential transformation network rectifies irregular text by decomposing the task into a series of patch-wise basic transformations, followed by a grid projection submodule to smooth the junction between neighboring patches. The entire rectification process is able to be trained in an end-to-end weakly supervised manner, requiring only images and their corresponding groundtruth text. Based on the rectified images, an attention-based recognition network is employed to predict a character sequence. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of STAN on both regular and irregular text.
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Author(s) Name:  Qingxiang Lin,Canjie Luo,Lianwen Jin,Songxuan Lai
Journal name:  Pattern Recognition
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Publisher name:  Elsevier
DOI:  10.1016/j.patcog.2020.107692
Volume Information:  Volume 111, March 2021, 107692
Paper Link:   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031320320304957