MegaHan97K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Mega-Category Chinese Character Recognition with over 97K Categories

Foundational to the Chinese language and culture, Chinese characters encompass extraordinarily extensive and ever-expanding categories, with the latest Chinese GB18030-2022 standard containing 87,887 categories. The accurate recognition of this vast number of characters, termed mega-category recognition, presents a formidable yet crucial challenge for cultural heritage preservation and digital applications. Despite significant advances in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), mega-category recognition remains unexplored due to the absence of comprehensive datasets, with the largest existing dataset containing merely 16,151 categories. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce MegaHan97K, a mega-category, large-scale dataset covering an unprecedented 97,455 categories of Chinese characters. Our work offers three major contributions: (1) MegaHan97K is the first dataset to fully support the latest GB18030-2022 standard, providing at least six times more categories than existing datasets; (2) It effectively addresses the long-tail distribution problem by providing balanced samples across all categories through its three distinct subsets: handwritten, historical and synthetic subsets; (3) Comprehensive benchmarking experiments reveal new challenges in mega-category scenarios, including increased storage demands, morphologically similar character recognition, and zero-shot learning difficulties, while also unlocking substantial opportunities for future research. To the best of our knowledge, the MetaHan97K is likely the dataset with the largest classes not only in the field of OCR but may also in the broader domain of pattern recognition. The dataset is available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/MegaHan97K.

ViT-LSLA: Vision Transformer with Light Self-Limited-Attention

Transformers have demonstrated a competitive performance across a wide range of vision tasks, while it is very expensive to compute the global self-attention. Many methods limit the range of attention within a local window to reduce computation complexity. However, their approaches cannot save the number of parameters; meanwhile, the self-attention and inner position bias (inside the softmax function) cause each query to focus on similar and close patches. Consequently, this paper presents a light self-limited-attention (LSLA) consisting of a light self-attention mechanism (LSA) to save the computation cost and the number of parameters, and a self-limited-attention mechanism (SLA) to improve the performance. Firstly, the LSA replaces the K (Key) and V (Value) of self-attention with the X(origin input). Applying it in vision Transformers which have encoder architecture and self-attention mechanism, can simplify the computation. Secondly, the SLA has a positional information module and a limited-attention module. The former contains a dynamic scale and an inner position bias to adjust the distribution of the self-attention scores and enhance the positional information. The latter uses an outer position bias after the softmax function to limit some large values of attention weights. Finally, a hierarchical Vision Transformer with Light self-Limited-attention (ViT-LSLA) is presented. The experiments show that ViT-LSLA achieves 71.6% top-1 accuracy on IP102 (2.4% absolute improvement of Swin-T); 87.2% top-1 accuracy on Mini-ImageNet (3.7% absolute improvement of Swin-T). Furthermore, it greatly reduces FLOPs (3.5GFLOPs vs. 4.5GFLOPs of Swin-T) and parameters (18.9M vs. 27.6M of Swin-T).