MA-CharNet: Multi-angle fusion character recognition network

PLoS One. 2022 Aug 29;17(8):e0272601. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272601. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Irregular text recognition of natural scene is a challenging task due to large span of character angles and morphological diversity of a word. Recent work first rectifies curved word region, and then employ sequence algorithm to complete the recognition task. However, this strategy largely depends on rectification quality of the text region, and cannot be applied to large difference between tilt angles of character. In this work, a novel anchor-free network structure of rotating character detection is proposed, which includes multiple sub-angle domain branch networks, and the corresponding branch network can be selected adaptively according to character tilt angle. Meanwhile, a curvature Adaptive Text linking method is proposed to connect the discrete strings detected on the two-dimensional plane into words according to people's habits. We achieved state-of-the-art performance on two irregular texts (TotalText, CTW1500), outperforming state-of-the-art by 2.4% and 2.7%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Humans

Grants and funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China(Award Number:61806150) and Wuhan University of Science and Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fund(Award Number:JCX2021054).