Scene Text Analysis using Deep Belief Networks

Abstract

This paper focuses on the recognition and analysis of text embedded in scene images using Deep learning. The proposed approach uses deep learning architectures for automated higher order feature extraction, thereby improving classification accuracies in comparison to handcrafted features used traditionally. Exhaustive experiments have been performed with Deep Belief Networks and Convolutional Deep Neural Networks with varied training algorithms like Contrastive Divergence, De-noising Score Matching and supervised learning algorithms such as logistic regression and Multi-layer perceptron. These algorithms have been validated on 4 standard datasets: Chars 74K English, Chars 74K Kannada, ICDAR 2003 Robust OCR dataset and SVT-CHAR dataset. The proposed network achieves improved recognition results on Chars74K English, Kannada and SVT-CHAR dataset in comparison to the state-of-art algorithms. For ICDAR 2003 dataset, the proposed network is marginally worse in comparison to Deep Convolutional networks. Although deep belief networks have been considerably used for several applications, according to the knowledge of the authors, this is the first paper to report scene text recognition using deep belief networks.