Orientation Robust Scene Text Recognition in Natural Scene*

Abstract

In recent years, scene text recognition has achieved significant improvement and various state-of-the-art recognition approaches have been proposed. This paper focused on recognizing text in natural photos of equipment nameplates, which has wide applications in industrial automations. This task only receives little attentions in previous works. The challenge of this problem comes from multi-orientation, curved, noisy and blurry text patches in equipment nameplates. To address this problem, we propose a deep model for text recognition in multi-oriented nameplates, namely, Orientation Robust Scene Text Recognition (ORSTR). Specifically, our model employs a rectification module to transform curved, distorted or multi-orientation text to near-horizontal text with a carefully designed rectification module. Once the near-horizontal text has been generated, recognition network will output the predictions of text patches. Our scene text recognition model achieves 90.8% recognition accuracy on equipment nameplate dataset which outperforms previous scene text recognition model (CRNN) about 0.8%. Several extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of our model.