HENet: Forcing a Network to Think More for Font Recognition

Although lots of progress were made in Text Recognition/OCR in recent years, the task of font recognition is remaining challenging. The main challenge lies in the subtle difference between these similar fonts, which is hard to distinguish. This paper proposes a novel font recognizer with a pluggable module solving the font recognition task. The pluggable module hides the most discriminative accessible features and forces the network to consider other complicated features to solve the hard examples of similar fonts, called HE Block. Compared with the available public font recognition systems, our proposed method does not require any interactions at the inference stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HENet achieves encouraging performance, including on character-level dataset Explor_all and word-level dataset AdobeVFR

IFR: Iterative Fusion Based Recognizer For Low Quality Scene Text Recognition

Although recent works based on deep learning have made progress in improving recognition accuracy on scene text recognition, how to handle low-quality text images in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Fusion based Recognizer (IFR) for low quality scene text recognition, taking advantage of refined text images input and robust feature representation. IFR contains two branches which focus on scene text recognition and low quality scene text image recovery respectively. We utilize an iterative collaboration between two branches, which can effectively alleviate the impact of low quality input. A feature fusion module is proposed to strengthen the feature representation of the two branches, where the features from the Recognizer are Fused with image Restoration branch, referred to as RRF. Without changing the recognition network structure, extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline methods in boosting the recognition accuracy of benchmark datasets and low resolution images in TextZoom dataset.