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Proceedings ArticleDOI

An OCR for Classical Indic Documents Containing Arbitrarily Long Words

TL;DR: A Sanskrit specific OCR system for printed classical Indic documents written in Sanskrit is developed, and an attention-based LSTM model for reading Sanskrit characters in line images is presented, setting the stage for application of OCRs on large corpora of classic Sanskrit texts containing arbitrarily long and highly conjoined words.
Abstract: OCR for printed classical Indic documents written in Sanskrit is a challenging research problem. It involves complexities such as image degradation, lack of datasets and long-length words. Due to these challenges, the word accuracy of available OCR systems, both academic and industrial, is not very high for such documents. To address these shortcomings, we develop a Sanskrit specific OCR system. We present an attention-based LSTM model for reading Sanskrit characters in line images. We introduce a dataset of Sanskrit document images annotated at line level. To augment real data and enable high performance for our OCR, we also generate synthetic data via curated font selection and rendering designed to incorporate crucial glyph substitution rules. Consequently, our OCR achieves a word error rate of 15.97% and a character error rate of 3.71% on challenging Indic document texts and outperforms strong baselines. Overall, our contributions set the stage for application of OCRs on large corpora of classic Sanskrit texts containing arbitrarily long and highly conjoined words.

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Citations
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01 Jan 1969

9 citations

Book ChapterDOI
05 Sep 2021
TL;DR: In this article, the authors presented a new dataset for identity documents (ID) recognition called MIDV-LAIT, which includes textual fields in Perso-Arabic, Thai, and Indian scripts.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new dataset for identity documents (IDs) recognition called MIDV-LAIT. The main feature of the dataset is the textual fields in Perso-Arabic, Thai, and Indian scripts. Since open datasets with real IDs may not be published, we synthetically generated all the images and data. Even faces are generated and do not belong to any particular person. Recently some datasets have appeared for evaluation of the IDs detection, type identification, and recognition, but these datasets cover only Latin-based and Cyrillic-based languages. The proposed dataset is to fix this issue and make it easier to evaluate and compare various methods. As a baseline, we process all the textual field images in MIDV-LAIT with Tesseract OCR. The resulting recognition accuracy shows that the dataset is challenging and is of use for further researches.

3 citations

Book ChapterDOI
05 Sep 2021
TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare various features like the size (width and height) of the word images and word length statistics and discover that these factors are critical for the scene-text recognition systems.
Abstract: Scene-text recognition is remarkably better in Latin languages than the non-Latin languages due to several factors like multiple fonts, simplistic vocabulary statistics, updated data generation tools, and writing systems. This paper examines the possible reasons for low accuracy by comparing English datasets with non-Latin languages. We compare various features like the size (width and height) of the word images and word length statistics. Over the last decade, generating synthetic datasets with powerful deep learning techniques has tremendously improved scene-text recognition. Several controlled experiments are performed on English, by varying the number of (i) fonts to create the synthetic data and (ii) created word images. We discover that these factors are critical for the scene-text recognition systems. The English synthetic datasets utilize over 1400 fonts while Arabic and other non-Latin datasets utilize less than 100 fonts for data generation. Since some of these languages are a part of different regions, we garner additional fonts through a region-based search to improve the scene-text recognition models in Arabic and Devanagari. We improve the Word Recognition Rates (WRRs) on Arabic MLT-17 and MLT-19 datasets by \(24.54\%\) and \(2.32\%\) compared to previous works or baselines. We achieve WRR gains of \(7.88\%\) and \(3.72\%\) for IIIT-ILST and MLT-19 Devanagari datasets.

3 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as mentioned in this paper proposed a novel neural network architecture, which integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a unified framework, and achieved remarkable performances in both lexicon free and lexicon-based scene text recognition tasks.
Abstract: Image-based sequence recognition has been a long-standing research topic in computer vision. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text recognition, which is among the most important and challenging tasks in image-based sequence recognition. A novel neural network architecture, which integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a unified framework, is proposed. Compared with previous systems for scene text recognition, the proposed architecture possesses four distinctive properties: (1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most of the existing algorithms whose components are separately trained and tuned. (2) It naturally handles sequences in arbitrary lengths, involving no character segmentation or horizontal scale normalization. (3) It is not confined to any predefined lexicon and achieves remarkable performances in both lexicon-free and lexicon-based scene text recognition tasks. (4) It generates an effective yet much smaller model, which is more practical for real-world application scenarios. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K, Street View Text and ICDAR datasets, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the prior arts. Moreover, the proposed algorithm performs well in the task of image-based music score recognition, which evidently verifies the generality of it.

2,184 citations

Proceedings Article
29 Nov 1999
TL;DR: An algorithm, DAGSVM, is presented, which operates in a kernel-induced feature space and uses two-class maximal margin hyperplanes at each decision-node of the DDAG, which is substantially faster to train and evaluate than either the standard algorithm or Max Wins, while maintaining comparable accuracy to both of these algorithms.
Abstract: We present a new learning architecture: the Decision Directed Acyclic Graph (DDAG), which is used to combine many two-class classifiers into a multiclass classifier. For an N-class problem, the DDAG contains N(N - 1)/2 classifiers, one for each pair of classes. We present a VC analysis of the case when the node classifiers are hyperplanes; the resulting bound on the test error depends on N and on the margin achieved at the nodes, but not on the dimension of the space. This motivates an algorithm, DAGSVM, which operates in a kernel-induced feature space and uses two-class maximal margin hyperplanes at each decision-node of the DDAG. The DAGSVM is substantially faster to train and evaluate than either the standard algorithm or Max Wins, while maintaining comparable accuracy to both of these algorithms.

1,857 citations


"An OCR for Classical Indic Document..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Jawahar et al. [11] use a DAG-SVM [25] to recognize separated character images....

    [...]

  • ...[11] use a DAG-SVM [25] to recognize separated character images....

    [...]

Proceedings Article
Oriol Vinyals1, Lukasz Kaiser1, Terry Koo1, Slav Petrov1, Ilya Sutskever1, Geoffrey E. Hinton1 
07 Dec 2015
TL;DR: The domain agnostic attention-enhanced sequence-to-sequence model achieves state-of-the-art results on the most widely used syntactic constituency parsing dataset, when trained on a large synthetic corpus that was annotated using existing parsers.
Abstract: Syntactic constituency parsing is a fundamental problem in natural language processing and has been the subject of intensive research and engineering for decades. As a result, the most accurate parsers are domain specific, complex, and inefficient. In this paper we show that the domain agnostic attention-enhanced sequence-to-sequence model achieves state-of-the-art results on the most widely used syntactic constituency parsing dataset, when trained on a large synthetic corpus that was annotated using existing parsers. It also matches the performance of standard parsers when trained only on a small human-annotated dataset, which shows that this model is highly data-efficient, in contrast to sequence-to-sequence models without the attention mechanism. Our parser is also fast, processing over a hundred sentences per second with an unoptimized CPU implementation.

817 citations


"An OCR for Classical Indic Document..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Following [38], the attention mechanism operates on BLSTM’s hidden state sequence h (= {h(1), h(2), ....

    [...]

Proceedings ArticleDOI
09 Mar 2016
TL;DR: In this paper, recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R2AM) were used for lexicon-free optical character recognition in natural scene images, and they achieved state-of-the-art performance on the Street View Text, IIIT5k, ICDAR and Synth90k.
Abstract: We present recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R2AM) 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.

333 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: This work presents recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R2AM) for lexicon-free optical character recognition in natural scene images and validates the method with state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmark datasets.
Abstract: 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.

327 citations


"An OCR for Classical Indic Document..." refers background in this paper

  • ...In the field of photo OCR, lexicon-free recognition has achieved great benefits using attention-based models [17]....

    [...]