Recursive Recurrent Nets with Attention Modeling for OCR in the Wild
This addresses the problem of lexicon-free OCR in the wild for applications like text extraction from images, with incremental improvements in method efficiency and performance.
The paper tackled optical character recognition in natural scene images by proposing recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R^2AM), achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets like Street View Text, IIIT5k, ICDAR, and Synth90k.
We present recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R$^2$AM) for lexicon-free optical character recognition in natural scene images. The primary advantages of the proposed method are: (1) use of recursive convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which allow for parametrically efficient and effective image feature extraction; (2) an implicitly learned character-level language model, embodied in a recurrent neural network which avoids the need to use N-grams; and (3) the use of a soft-attention mechanism, allowing the model to selectively exploit image features in a coordinated way, and allowing for end-to-end training within a standard backpropagation framework. We validate our method with state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmark datasets: Street View Text, IIIT5k, ICDAR and Synth90k.