An algorithm for natural images text recognition using four direction features

Abstract

Irregular text has widespread applications in multiple areas. Different from regular text, irregular text is difficult to recognize because of its various shapes and distorted patterns. In this paper, we develop a multidirectional convolutional neural network (MCN) to extract four direction features to fully describe the textual information. Meanwhile, the character placement possibility is extracted as the weight of the four direction features. Based on these works, we propose the encoder to fuse the four direction features for the generation of feature code to predict the character sequence. The whole network is end-to-end trainable due to using images and word-level labels. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K, SVT, CUTE80, and ICDAR datasets, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method on both regular and irregular datasets. The developed method shows an increase of 1.2% in the CUTE80 dataset and 1.5% in the SVT dataset, and has fewer parameters than most existing methods.