Bangbang Zhou

Bangbang Zhou, Yadong Qu, Zixiao Wang et al.

Recently, scene text recognition (STR) models have shown significant performance improvements. However, existing models still encounter difficulties in recognizing challenging texts that involve factors such as severely distorted and perspective characters. These challenging texts mainly cause two problems: (1) Large Intra-Class Variance. (2) Small Inter-Class Variance. An extremely distorted character may prominently differ visually from other characters within the same category, while the variance between characters from different classes is relatively small. To address the above issues, we propose a novel method that enriches the character features to enhance the discriminability of characters. Firstly, we propose the Character-Aware Constraint Encoder (CACE) with multiple blocks stacked. CACE introduces a decay matrix in each block to explicitly guide the attention region for each token. By continuously employing the decay matrix, CACE enables tokens to perceive morphological information at the character level. Secondly, an Intra-Inter Consistency Loss (I^2CL) is introduced to consider intra-class compactness and inter-class separability at feature space. I^2CL improves the discriminative capability of features by learning a long-term memory unit for each character category. Trained with synthetic data, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on common benchmarks (94.1% accuracy) and Union14M-Benchmark (61.6% accuracy). Code is available at https://github.com/bang123-box/CFE.

Bangbang Zhou, Hangdi Xing, Yifan Chen et al.

Document parsing converts visually rich documents into machine-readable structured representations, forming a crucial foundation for information systems. Although many benchmarks have been proposed for document parsing, they remain inadequate for realistic scenarios. Existing benchmarks either focus on specific tasks or assess only single-page, text-centric settings, making them insufficient for practical multi-page parsing. Moreover, they lack fine-grained evaluation of semantic continuity, hierarchical structure recovery, and visual content preservation. To address these gaps, we propose MPDocBench-Parse, a benchmark for multi-page document parsing in real-world applications. It contains 433 manually annotated documents with 3,246 pages, covering 15 document types in English and Chinese, with diverse layout styles, and supports document-level end-to-end evaluation. We further design a comprehensive protocol for content fidelity and logical structure, covering text, table, and formula recognition, truncated text and table merging, figure extraction, reading order, and heading hierarchy recovery. Experiments show that, while existing models perform well on basic text extraction, they still suffer clear limitations in semantic continuity integration, visual content parsing, and hierarchical structure recovery. MPDocBench-Parse provides a unified foundation for advancing document parsing toward more realistic scenarios.

Yadong Qu, Yuxin Wang, Bangbang Zhou et al.

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.