Topic:Scene Text Recognition
What is Scene Text Recognition? Scene text recognition is the process of identifying and transcribing text in natural scenes using computer vision techniques.
Papers and Code
Feb 18, 2025
Abstract:In real-world action recognition systems, incorporating more attributes helps achieve a more comprehensive understanding of human behavior. However, using a single model to simultaneously recognize multiple attributes can lead to a decrease in accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel method i.e. Adaptive Attribute Prototype Model (AAPM) for human action recognition, which captures rich action-relevant attribute information and strikes a balance between accuracy and robustness. Firstly, we introduce the Text-Constrain Module (TCM) to incorporate textual information from potential labels, and constrain the construction of different attributes prototype representations. In addition, we explore the Attribute Assignment Method (AAM) to address the issue of training bias and increase robustness during the training process.Furthermore, we construct a new video dataset with attribute-based multi-label called Multi-Kinetics for evaluation, which contains various attribute labels (e.g. action, scene, object, etc.) related to human behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AAPM achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both attribute-based multi-label few-shot action recognition and single-label few-shot action recognition. The project and dataset are available at an anonymous account https://github.com/theAAPM/AAPM
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Feb 13, 2025
Abstract:Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in scene understanding and perception tasks, enabling robots to plan and execute actions adaptively in dynamic environments. However, most multimodal large language models lack robust 3D scene localization capabilities, limiting their effectiveness in fine-grained robotic operations. Additionally, challenges such as low recognition accuracy, inefficiency, poor transferability, and reliability hinder their use in precision tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that integrates a 2D prompt synthesis module by mapping 2D images to point clouds, and incorporates a small language model (SLM) for supervising VLM outputs. The 2D prompt synthesis module enables VLMs, trained on 2D images and text, to autonomously extract precise 3D spatial information without manual intervention, significantly enhancing 3D scene understanding. Meanwhile, the SLM supervises VLM outputs, mitigating hallucinations and ensuring reliable, executable robotic control code generation. Our framework eliminates the need for retraining in new environments, thereby improving cost efficiency and operational robustness. Experimental results that the proposed framework achieved a 96.0\% Task Success Rate (TSR), outperforming other methods. Ablation studies demonstrated the critical role of both the 2D prompt synthesis module and the output supervision module (which, when removed, caused a 67\% TSR drop). These findings validate the framework's effectiveness in improving 3D recognition, task planning, and robotic task execution.
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Feb 27, 2025
Abstract:3D Affordance detection is a challenging problem with broad applications on various robotic tasks. Existing methods typically formulate the detection paradigm as a label-based semantic segmentation task. This paradigm relies on predefined labels and lacks the ability to comprehend complex natural language, resulting in limited generalization in open-world scene. To address these limitations, we reformulate the traditional affordance detection paradigm into \textit{Instruction Reasoning Affordance Segmentation} (IRAS) task. This task is designed to output a affordance mask region given a query reasoning text, which avoids fixed categories of input labels. We accordingly propose the \textit{3D-AffordanceLLM} (3D-ADLLM), a framework designed for reasoning affordance detection in 3D open-scene. Specifically, 3D-ADLLM introduces large language models (LLMs) to 3D affordance perception with a custom-designed decoder for generating affordance masks, thus achieving open-world reasoning affordance detection. In addition, given the scarcity of 3D affordance datasets for training large models, we seek to extract knowledge from general segmentation data and transfer it to affordance detection. Thus, we propose a multi-stage training strategy that begins with a novel pre-training task, i.e., \textit{Referring Object Part Segmentation}~(ROPS). This stage is designed to equip the model with general recognition and segmentation capabilities at the object-part level. Then followed by fine-tuning with the IRAS task, 3D-ADLLM obtains the reasoning ability for affordance detection. In summary, 3D-ADLLM leverages the rich world knowledge and human-object interaction reasoning ability of LLMs, achieving approximately an 8\% improvement in mIoU on open-vocabulary affordance detection tasks.
* ICLR
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Dec 02, 2024
Abstract:Scene text recognition (STR) suffers from the challenges of either less realistic synthetic training data or the difficulty of collecting sufficient high-quality real-world data, limiting the effectiveness of trained STR models. Meanwhile, despite producing holistically appealing text images, diffusion-based text image generation methods struggle to generate accurate and realistic instance-level text on a large scale. To tackle this, we introduce TextSSR: a novel framework for Synthesizing Scene Text Recognition data via a diffusion-based universal text region synthesis model. It ensures accuracy by focusing on generating text within a specified image region and leveraging rich glyph and position information to create the less complex text region compared to the entire image. Furthermore, we utilize neighboring text within the region as a prompt to capture real-world font styles and layout patterns, guiding the generated text to resemble actual scenes. Finally, due to its prompt-free nature and capability for character-level synthesis, TextSSR enjoys a wonderful scalability and we construct an anagram-based TextSSR-F dataset with 0.4 million text instances with complexity and realism. Experiments show that models trained on added TextSSR-F data exhibit better accuracy compared to models trained on 4 million existing synthetic data. Moreover, its accuracy margin to models trained fully on a real-world dataset is less than 3.7%, confirming TextSSR's effectiveness and its great potential in scene text image synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/TextSSR.
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Jan 07, 2025
Abstract:Generating visual text in natural scene images is a challenging task with many unsolved problems. Different from generating text on artificially designed images (such as posters, covers, cartoons, etc.), the text in natural scene images needs to meet the following four key criteria: (1) Fidelity: the generated text should appear as realistic as a photograph and be completely accurate, with no errors in any of the strokes. (2) Reasonability: the text should be generated on reasonable carrier areas (such as boards, signs, walls, etc.), and the generated text content should also be relevant to the scene. (3) Utility: the generated text can facilitate to the training of natural scene OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tasks. (4) Controllability: The attribute of the text (such as font and color) should be controllable as needed. In this paper, we propose a two stage method, SceneVTG++, which simultaneously satisfies the four aspects mentioned above. SceneVTG++ consists of a Text Layout and Content Generator (TLCG) and a Controllable Local Text Diffusion (CLTD). The former utilizes the world knowledge of multi modal large language models to find reasonable text areas and recommend text content according to the nature scene background images, while the latter generates controllable multilingual text based on the diffusion model. Through extensive experiments, we respectively verified the effectiveness of TLCG and CLTD, and demonstrated the state-of-the-art text generation performance of SceneVTG++. In addition, the generated images have superior utility in OCR tasks like text detection and text recognition. Codes and datasets will be available.
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Dec 13, 2024
Abstract:Scene text spotting has attracted the enthusiasm of relative researchers in recent years. Most existing scene text spotters follow the detection-then-recognition paradigm, where the vanilla detection module hardly determines the reading order and leads to failure recognition. After rethinking the auto-regressive scene text recognition method, we find that a well-trained recognizer can implicitly perceive the local semantics of all characters in a complete word or a sentence without a character-level detection module. Local semantic knowledge not only includes text content but also spatial information in the right reading order. Motivated by the above analysis, we propose the Local Semantics Guided scene text Spotter (LSGSpotter), which auto-regressively decodes the position and content of characters guided by the local semantics. Specifically, two effective modules are proposed in LSGSpotter. On the one hand, we design a Start Point Localization Module (SPLM) for locating text start points to determine the right reading order. On the other hand, a Multi-scale Adaptive Attention Module (MAAM) is proposed to adaptively aggregate text features in a local area. In conclusion, LSGSpotter achieves the arbitrary reading order spotting task without the limitation of sophisticated detection, while alleviating the cost of computational resources with the grid sampling strategy. Extensive experiment results show LSGSpotter achieves state-of-the-art performance on the InverseText benchmark. Moreover, our spotter demonstrates superior performance on English benchmarks for arbitrary-shaped text, achieving improvements of 0.7\% and 2.5\% on Total-Text and SCUT-CTW1500, respectively. These results validate our text spotter is effective for scene texts in arbitrary reading order and shape.
* Accepted by AAAI2025
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Nov 24, 2024
Abstract:Connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-based scene text recognition (STR) methods, e.g., SVTR, are widely employed in OCR applications, mainly due to their simple architecture, which only contains a visual model and a CTC-aligned linear classifier, and therefore fast inference. However, they generally have worse accuracy than encoder-decoder-based methods (EDTRs), particularly in challenging scenarios. In this paper, we propose SVTRv2, a CTC model that beats leading EDTRs in both accuracy and inference speed. SVTRv2 introduces novel upgrades to handle text irregularity and utilize linguistic context, which endows it with the capability to deal with challenging and diverse text instances. First, a multi-size resizing (MSR) strategy is proposed to adaptively resize the text and maintain its readability. Meanwhile, we introduce a feature rearrangement module (FRM) to ensure that visual features accommodate the alignment requirement of CTC well, thus alleviating the alignment puzzle. Second, we propose a semantic guidance module (SGM). It integrates linguistic context into the visual model, allowing it to leverage language information for improved accuracy. Moreover, SGM can be omitted at the inference stage and would not increase the inference cost. We evaluate SVTRv2 in both standard and recent challenging benchmarks, where SVTRv2 is fairly compared with 24 mainstream STR models across multiple scenarios, including different types of text irregularity, languages, and long text. The results indicate that SVTRv2 surpasses all the EDTRs across the scenarios in terms of accuracy and speed. Code is available at https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.
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Nov 23, 2024
Abstract:Existing scene text recognition (STR) methods struggle to recognize challenging texts, especially for artistic and severely distorted characters. The limitation lies in the insufficient exploration of character morphologies, including the monotonousness of widely used synthetic training data and the sensitivity of the model to character morphologies. To address these issues, inspired by the human learning process of viewing and summarizing, we facilitate the contrastive learning-based STR framework in a self-motivated manner by leveraging synthetic and real unlabeled data without any human cost. In the viewing process, to compensate for the simplicity of synthetic data and enrich character morphology diversity, we propose an Online Generation Strategy to generate background-free samples with diverse character styles. By excluding background noise distractions, the model is encouraged to focus on character morphology and generalize the ability to recognize complex samples when trained with only simple synthetic data. To boost the summarizing process, we theoretically demonstrate the derivation error in the previous character contrastive loss, which mistakenly causes the sparsity in the intra-class distribution and exacerbates ambiguity on challenging samples. Therefore, a new Character Unidirectional Alignment Loss is proposed to correct this error and unify the representation of the same characters in all samples by aligning the character features in the student model with the reference features in the teacher model. Extensive experiment results show that our method achieves SOTA performance (94.7\% and 70.9\% average accuracy on common benchmarks and Union14M-Benchmark). Code will be available at https://github.com/qqqyd/ViSu.
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Nov 19, 2024
Abstract:Context-aware methods have achieved remarkable advancements in supervised scene text recognition by leveraging semantic priors from words. Considering the heterogeneity of text and background in STR, we propose that such contextual priors can be reinterpreted as the relations between textual elements, serving as effective self-supervised labels for representation learning. However, textual relations are restricted to the finite size of the dataset due to lexical dependencies, which causes over-fitting problem, thus compromising the representation quality. To address this, our work introduces a unified framework of Relational Contrastive Learning and Masked Image Modeling for STR (RCMSTR), which explicitly models the enriched textual relations. For the RCL branch, we first introduce the relational rearrangement module to cultivate new relations on the fly. Based on this, we further conduct relational contrastive learning to model the intra- and inter-hierarchical relations for frames, sub-words and words. On the other hand, MIM can naturally boost the context information via masking, where we find that the block masking strategy is more effective for STR. For the effective integration of RCL and MIM, we also introduce a novel decoupling design aimed at mitigating the impact of masked images on contrastive learning. Additionally, to enhance the compatibility of MIM with CNNs, we propose the adoption of sparse convolutions and directly sharing the weights with dense convolutions in training. The proposed RCMSTR demonstrates superior performance in various evaluation protocols for different STR-related downstream tasks, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art self-supervised STR techniques. Ablation studies and qualitative experimental results further validate the effectiveness of our method. The code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/ThunderVVV/RCMSTR .
* arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2308.00508
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Jan 20, 2025
Abstract:Images depicting complex, dynamic scenes are challenging to parse automatically, requiring both high-level comprehension of the overall situation and fine-grained identification of participating entities and their interactions. Current approaches use distinct methods tailored to sub-tasks such as Situation Recognition and detection of Human-Human and Human-Object Interactions. However, recent advances in image understanding have often leveraged web-scale vision-language (V&L) representations to obviate task-specific engineering. In this work, we propose a framework for dynamic scene understanding tasks by leveraging knowledge from modern, frozen V&L representations. By framing these tasks in a generic manner - as predicting and parsing structured text, or by directly concatenating representations to the input of existing models - we achieve state-of-the-art results while using a minimal number of trainable parameters relative to existing approaches. Moreover, our analysis of dynamic knowledge of these representations shows that recent, more powerful representations effectively encode dynamic scene semantics, making this approach newly possible.
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