Paper:
Instruction-Guided Scene Text Recognition, Yongkun Du, Zhineng Chen, Yuchen Su, Caiyan Jia, Yu-Gang Jiang, TPAMI
Multi-modal models have shown appealing performance in visual recognition tasks, as free-form text-guided training evokes the ability to understand fine-grained visual content. However, current models cannot be trivially applied to scene text recognition (STR) due to the compositional difference between natural and text images. We propose a novel instruction-guided scene text recognition (IGTR) paradigm that formulates STR as an instruction learning problem and understands text images by predicting character attributes, e.g., character frequency, position, etc. IGTR first devises $\left \langle condition,question,answer\right \rangle$ instruction triplets, providing rich and diverse descriptions of character attributes. To effectively learn these attributes through question-answering, IGTR develops a lightweight instruction encoder, a cross-modal feature fusion module and a multi-task answer head, which guides nuanced text image understanding. Furthermore, IGTR realizes different recognition pipelines simply by using different instructions, enabling a character-understanding-based text reasoning paradigm that differs from current methods considerably. Experiments on English and Chinese benchmarks show that IGTR outperforms existing models by significant margins, while maintaining a small model size and fast inference speed. Moreover, by adjusting the sampling of instructions, IGTR offers an elegant way to tackle the recognition of rarely appearing and morphologically similar characters, which were previous challenges.
The accuracy (%) and model files of IGTR on the public dataset of scene text recognition are as follows:
Model | IC13 857 |
SVT | IIIT5k 3000 |
IC15 1811 |
SVTP | CUTE80 | Avg | Config&Model&Log |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
IGTR-PD | 97.6 | 95.2 | 97.6 | 88.4 | 91.6 | 95.5 | 94.30 | link |
IGTR-AR | 98.6 | 95.7 | 98.2 | 88.4 | 92.4 | 95.5 | 94.78 | as above |
Model | Curve | Multi- Oriented |
Artistic | Contextless | Salient | Multi- word |
General | Avg | Config&Model&Log |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
IGTR-PD | 76.9 | 30.6 | 59.1 | 63.3 | 77.8 | 62.5 | 66.7 | 62.40 | Same as the above table |
IGTR-AR | 78.4 | 31.9 | 61.3 | 66.5 | 80.2 | 69.3 | 67.9 | 65.07 | as above |
Model | IC13 857 |
SVT | IIIT5k 3000 |
IC15 1811 |
SVTP | CUTE80 | Avg | Config&Model&Log |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
IGTR-PD | 97.7 | 97.7 | 98.3 | 89.8 | 93.7 | 97.9 | 95.86 | link |
IGTR-AR | 98.1 | 98.4 | 98.7 | 90.5 | 94.9 | 98.3 | 96.48 | as above |
IGTR-PD-60ep | 97.9 | 98.3 | 99.2 | 90.8 | 93.7 | 97.6 | 96.24 | link |
IGTR-AR-60ep | 98.4 | 98.1 | 99.3 | 91.5 | 94.3 | 97.6 | 96.54 | as above |
IGTR-PD-PT | 98.6 | 98.0 | 99.1 | 91.7 | 96.8 | 99.0 | 97.20 | link |
IGTR-AR-PT | 98.8 | 98.3 | 99.2 | 92.0 | 96.8 | 99.0 | 97.34 | as above |
Model | Curve | Multi- Oriented |
Artistic | Contextless | Salient | Multi- word |
General | Avg | Config&Model&Log |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
IGTR-PD | 88.1 | 89.9 | 74.2 | 80.3 | 82.8 | 79.2 | 83.0 | 82.51 | Same as the above table |
IGTR-AR | 90.4 | 91.2 | 77.0 | 82.4 | 84.7 | 84.0 | 84.4 | 84.86 | as above |
IGTR-PD-60ep | 90.0 | 92.1 | 77.5 | 82.8 | 86.0 | 83.0 | 84.8 | 85.18 | Same as the above table |
IGTR-AR-60ep | 91.0 | 93.0 | 78.7 | 84.6 | 87.3 | 84.8 | 85.6 | 86.43 | as above |
IGTR-PD-PT | 92.4 | 92.1 | 80.7 | 83.6 | 87.7 | 86.9 | 85.0 | 86.92 | Same as the above table |
IGTR-AR-PT | 93.0 | 92.9 | 81.3 | 83.4 | 88.6 | 88.7 | 85.6 | 87.65 | as above |
Model | Scene | Web | Document | Handwriting | Avg | Config&Model&Log |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
IGTR-PD | 73.1 | 74.8 | 98.6 | 52.5 | 74.75 | |
IGTR-AR | 75.1 | 76.4 | 98.7 | 55.3 | 76.37 | |
IGTR-PD-TS | 73.5 | 75.9 | 98.7 | 54.5 | 75.65 | link |
IGTR-AR-TS | 75.6 | 77.0 | 98.8 | 57.3 | 77.17 | as above |
IGTR-PD-Aug | 79.5 | 80.0 | 99.4 | 58.9 | 79.45 | link |
IGTR-AR-Aug | 82.0 | 81.7 | 99.5 | 63.8 | 81.74 | as above |
Download all Configs, Models, and Logs from Google Drive.
Python version >= 3.7
git clone -b develop https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.git
cd OpenOCR
# A100 Ubuntu 20.04 Cuda 11.8
conda create -n openocr python==3.8
conda activate openocr
conda install pytorch==2.2.0 torchvision==0.17.0 torchaudio==2.2.0 pytorch-cuda=11.8 -c pytorch -c nvidia
pip install -r requirements.txt
The expected filesystem structure is as follows:
benchmark_bctr
├── benchmark_bctr_test
│ ├── document_test
│ ├── handwriting_test
│ ├── scene_test
│ └── web_test
└── benchmark_bctr_train
├── document_train
├── handwriting_train
├── scene_train
└── web_train
evaluation
├── CUTE80
├── IC13_857
├── IC15_1811
├── IIIT5k
├── SVT
└── SVTP
OpenOCR
synth
├── MJ
│ ├── test
│ ├── train
│ └── val
└── ST
test # from PARSeq
├── ArT
├── COCOv1.4
├── CUTE80
├── IC13_1015
├── IC13_1095
├── IC13_857
├── IC15_1811
├── IC15_2077
├── IIIT5k
├── SVT
├── SVTP
└── Uber
u14m # lmdb format
├── artistic
├── contextless
├── curve
├── general
├── multi_oriented
├── multi_words
└── salient
Union14M-L-LMDB-Filtered # lmdb format
├── train_challenging
├── train_easy
├── train_hard
├── train_medium
└── train_normal
Training:
# The configuration file is available from the link provided in the table above.
# Multi GPU training
CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 python -m torch.distributed.launch --nproc_per_node=2 tools/train_rec.py --c PATH/svtr_base_igtr_XXX.yml
Evaluation:
# The configuration file is available from the link provided in the table above.
# en
python tools/eval_rec_all_en.py --c PATH/svtr_base_igtr_syn.yml
# ch
python tools/eval_rec_all_ch.py --c PATH/svtr_base_igtr_ch_aug.yml
If you find our method useful for your reserach, please cite:
@article{Du2024IGTR,
title = {Instruction-Guided Scene Text Recognition},
author = {Du, Yongkun and Chen, Zhineng and Su, Yuchen and Jia, Caiyan and Jiang, Yu-Gang},
journal = {CoRR},
eprinttype = {arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV},
volume = {abs/2401.17851},
year = {2024},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17851}
}