A Synthetic Recipe for OCR Synthetic data generation for optical character recognition (OCR) promises unlimited training data at zero annotation cost. With enough fonts and seed text, we should be able to generate data to train a model that approaches or exceeds the performance with real annotated data. Unfortunately, this is not always the reality. Unconstrained image settings, such as internet memes, scanned web pages, or newspapers, present diverse scripts, fonts, layouts, and complex backgrounds, which cause models trained with synthetic data to break down. In this work, we investigate the synthetic image generation problem on a large multilingual set of unconstrained document images. Our work presents a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of synthetic data attributes on model performance. The results provide a recipe for synthetic data generation that will help guide future research.

Efficient, LexiconFree OCR using Deep Learning Contrary to popular belief, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) remains a challenging problem when text occurs in unconstrained environments, like natural scenes, due to geometrical distortions, complex backgrounds, and diverse fonts. In this paper, we present a segmentationfree OCR system that combines deep learning methods, synthetic training data generation, and data augmentation techniques. We render synthetic training data using large text corpora and over 2000 fonts. To simulate text occurring in complex natural scenes, we augment extracted samples with geometric distortions and with a proposed data augmentation technique  alphacompositing with background textures. Our models employ a convolutional neural network encoder to extract features from text images. Inspired by the recent progress in neural machine translation and language modeling, we examine the capabilities of both recurrent and convolutional neural networks in modeling the interactions between input elements. The proposed OCR system surpasses the accuracy of leading commercial and opensource engines on distorted text samples.