Robert Leer

Nathan Zachary, Gerald Carl, Russell Elijah et al.

Scene text recognition has made significant progress in recent years and has become an important part of the work-flow. The widespread use of mobile devices opens up wide possibilities for using OCR technologies in everyday life. However, lack of training data for new research in this area remains relevant. In this article, we present a new dataset consisting of real shots on smartphones and demonstrate the effectiveness of profile normalization in this task. In addition, the influence of various augmentations during the training of models for analyzing document images on smartphones is studied in detail. Our dataset is publicly available.

William Roy, Glen Kelly, Robert Leer et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been extremely successful in various application domains. Adversarial image synthesis has drawn increasing attention and made tremendous progress in recent years because of its wide range of applications in many computer vision and image processing problems. Among the many applications of GAN, image synthesis is the most well-studied one, and research in this area has already demonstrated the great potential of using GAN in image synthesis. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of methods used in image synthesis, review different models for text-to-image synthesis and image-to-image translation, and discuss some evaluation metrics as well as possible future research directions in image synthesis with GAN.

Robert Leer, Hessi Roma, James Amelia

The performance of image recognition like human pose detection, trained with simulated images would usually get worse due to the divergence between real and simulated data. To make the distribution of a simulated image close to that of real one, there are several works applying GAN-based image-to-image transformation methods, e.g., SimGAN and CycleGAN. However, these methods would not be sensitive enough to the various change in pose and shape of subjects, especially when the training data are imbalanced, e.g., some particular poses and shapes are minor in the training data. To overcome this problem, we propose to introduce the label information of subjects, e.g., pose and type of objects in the training of CycleGAN, and lead it to obtain label-wise transforamtion models. We evaluate our proposed method called Label-CycleGAN, through experiments on the digit image transformation from SVHN to MNIST and the surveillance camera image transformation from simulated to real images.