Character-Aware Sampling and Rectification for Scene Text Recognition

Abstract

Curved scene text recognition is a challenging task in multimedia society due to large shape and texture variance. Previous methods address this challenge by extracting and rectifying text line with equidistantly sampling, which ignore character level information and lead to distorted characters. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Character-Aware Sampling and Rectification (CASR) module, which rectifies irregular text instance according to the location and orientation information of each individual character. Specifically, CASR regards each character as a basic unit and predicts the character-level attributes for sampling and rectification. Our module not only exploits detailed character information to obtain better rectification of text line, but also employs character-level supervision in training process. In addition, CASR provides a plug-and-play module which can be easily incorporated to existing text recognition pipeline. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our method obtains more accurate rectified text instances and achieves promising performance. We will release our code and models in the future.