HAFE: A Hierarchical Awareness and Feature Enhancement Network for Scene Text Recognition

Abstract

Scene text recognition (STR) is to obtain text information from natural text images. Compared to the optical character recognition, STR has attracted much attentions due to the variability of scene images. However, most STR methods tend to loss some spatial information due to only simply adding Resnet-45 to the front end of the encoder. To solve this problem, we propose a Hierarchical Awareness and Feature Enhancement (HAFE) network. Our proposed Hierarchical Awareness (HA) module can effectively extract the depth information of scene text images from multiple dimensions and then improve the anti-interference ability of the network. Besides, the proposed Feature Enhancement (FE) module can enhance the stability of the model through strengthening the global features, which is helpful to improve the accuracy of text recognition. On the whole, our HAFE network tends to strengthen the information in encoder, better learn the feature maps from different levels, and then improve the recognition accuracy of non-horizontal texts. Extensive comparative experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that the proposed method has the most advanced performance and outperforms most state-of-the-art ones. Our code will be released at website: https://github.com/HAFE in the future.