End-to-End Text Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Full end-to-end text recognition in natural images is a challenging problem that has received much attention recently. Traditional systems in this area have relied on elaborate models incorporating carefully handengineered features or large amounts of prior knowledge. In this paper, we take a different route and combine the representational power of large, multilayer neural networks together with recent developments in unsupervised feature learning, which allows us to use a common framework to train highly-accurate text detector and character recognizer modules. Then, using only simple off-the-shelf methods, we integrate these two modules into a full end-to-end, lexicon-driven, scene text recognition system that achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, namely Street View Text and ICDAR 2003. 1