ODM: A Text-Image Further Alignment Pre-training Approach for Scene Text Detection and Spotting
Authors: Chen Duan, Pei Fu, Shan Guo, Qianyi Jiang, Xiaoming Wei

Abstract In recent years text-image joint pre-training techniques have shown promising results in various tasks. However in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks aligning text instances with their corresponding text regions in images poses a challenge as it requires effective alignment between text and OCR-Text (referring to the text in images as OCR-Text to distinguish from the text in natural language) rather than a holistic understanding of the overall image content. In this paper we propose a new pre-training method called OCR-Text Destylization Modeling (ODM) that transfers diverse styles of text found in images to a uniform style based on the text prompt. With ODM we achieve better alignment between text and OCR-Text and enable pre-trained models to adapt to the complex and diverse styles of scene text detection and spotting tasks. Additionally we have designed a new labeling generation method specifically for ODM and combined it with our proposed Text-Controller module to address the challenge of annotation costs in OCR tasks allowing a larger amount of unlabeled data to participate in pre-training. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance and outperforms current pre-training methods in scene text detection and spotting tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/PriNing/ODM.