SCATTER: Selective Context Attentional Scene Text Recognizer
Ron Litman,  Oron Anschel,  Shahar Tsiper,  Roee Litman,  Shai Mazor,  R. Manmatha

Scene Text Recognition (STR), the task of recognizing text against complex image backgrounds, is an active area of research. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods still struggle to recognize text written in arbitrary shapes. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture for STR, named Selective Context ATtentional Text Recognizer (SCATTER). SCATTER utilizes a stacked block architecture with intermediate supervision during training, that paves the way to successfully train a deep BiLSTM encoder, thus improving the encoding of contextual dependencies. Decoding is done using a two-step 1D attention mechanism. The first attention step re-weights visual features from a CNN backbone together with contextual features computed by a BiLSTM layer. The second attention step, similar to previous papers, treats the features as a sequence and attends to the intra-sequence relationships. Experiments show that the proposed approach surpasses SOTA performance on irregular text recognition benchmarks by 3.7% on average.