RoadText-1K: Text Detection & Recognition Dataset for Driving Videos
This dataset addresses the need for robust text perception in driver assistance and self-driving systems, but it is incremental as it primarily expands data scale.
The authors introduced RoadText-1K, a dataset 20 times larger than existing ones, for text detection and recognition in driving videos, and found that state-of-the-art methods face significant challenges on this unconstrained data.
Perceiving text is crucial to understand semantics of outdoor scenes and hence is a critical requirement to build intelligent systems for driver assistance and self-driving. Most of the existing datasets for text detection and recognition comprise still images and are mostly compiled keeping text in mind. This paper introduces a new "RoadText-1K" dataset for text in driving videos. The dataset is 20 times larger than the existing largest dataset for text in videos. Our dataset comprises 1000 video clips of driving without any bias towards text and with annotations for text bounding boxes and transcriptions in every frame. State of the art methods for text detection, recognition and tracking are evaluated on the new dataset and the results signify the challenges in unconstrained driving videos compared to existing datasets. This suggests that RoadText-1K is suited for research and development of reading systems, robust enough to be incorporated into more complex downstream tasks like driver assistance and self-driving. The dataset can be found at http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/roadtext-1k