Dictionary-guided Scene Text Recognition

Language prior plays an important role in the way humans detect and recognize text in the wild. Current scene text recognition methods do use lexicons to improve recognition performance, but their naive approach of casting the output into a dictionary word based purely on the edit distance has many limitations. In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate a dictionary in both the training and inference stage of a scene text recognition system. We use the dictionary to generate a list of possible outcomes and find the one that is most compatible with the visual appearance of the text. The proposed method leads to a robust scene text recognition model, which is better at handling ambiguous cases encountered in the wild, and improves the overall performance of state-of-the-art scene text spotting frameworks. Our work suggests that incorporating language prior is a potential approach to advance scene text detection and recognition methods. Besides, we contribute VinText, a challenging scene text dataset for Vietnamese, where some characters are equivocal in the visual form due to accent symbols. This dataset will serve as a challenging benchmark for measuring the applicability and robustness of scene text detection and recognition algorithms. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/dict-guided.