On Vocabulary Reliance in Scene Text Recognition
Zhaoyi Wan,  Jielei Zhang,  Liang Zhang,  Jiebo Luo,  Cong Yao

The pursuit of high performance on public benchmarks has been the driving force for research in scene text recognition, and notable progresses have been achieved. However, a close investigation reveals a startling fact that the state-of-the-art methods perform well on images with words within vocabulary but generalize poorly to images with words outside vocabulary. We call this phenomenon "vocabulary reliance". In this paper, we establish an analytical framework, in which different datasets, metrics and module combinations for quantitative comparisons are devised, to conduct an in-depth study on the problem of vocabulary reliance in scene text recognition. Key findings include: (1) Vocabulary reliance is ubiquitous, i.e., all existing algorithms more or less exhibit such characteristic; (2) Attention-based decoders prove weak in generalizing to words outside vocabulary and segmentation-based decoders perform well in utilizing visual features; (3) Context modeling is highly coupled with the prediction layers. These findings provide new insights and can benefit future research in scene text recognition. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective mutual learning strategy to allow models of two families (attention-based and segmentation-based) to learn collaboratively. This remedy alleviates the problem of vocabulary reliance and significantly improves the overall scene text recognition performance.