Text recognition has attracted considerable research interests because of its various applications. The cutting-edge text recognition methods are based on attention mechanisms. However, most of attention methods usually suffer from serious alignment problem due to its recurrency alignment operation, where the alignment relies on historical decoding results. To remedy this issue, we propose a decoupled attention network (DAN), which decouples the alignment operation from using historical decoding results. DAN is an effective, flexible and robust end-to-end text recognizer, which consists of three components: 1) a feature encoder that extracts visual features from the input image; 2) a convolutional alignment module that performs the alignment operation based on visual features from the encoder; and 3) a decoupled text decoder that makes final prediction by jointly using the feature map and attention maps. Experimental results show that DAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple text recognition tasks, including offline handwritten text recognition and regular/irregular scene text recognition. Codes will be released.1

The history of text can be traced back over thousands of years. Rich and precise semantic information carried by text is important in a wide range of vision-based application scenarios. Therefore, text recognition in natural scenes has been an active research topic in computer vision and pattern recognition. In recent years, with the rise and development of deep learning, numerous methods have shown promising results in terms of innovation, practicality, and efficiency. This article aims to (1) summarize the fundamental problems and the state-of-the-art associated with scene text recognition, (2) introduce new insights and ideas, (3) provide a comprehensive review of publicly available resources, and (4) point out directions for future work. In summary, this literature review attempts to present an entire picture of the field of scene text recognition. It provides a comprehensive reference for people entering this field and could be helpful in inspiring future research. Related resources are available at our GitHub repository: https://github.com/HCIILAB/Scene-Text-Recognition.

In this paper, we propose a novel method, aggregation cross-entropy (ACE), for sequence recognition from a brand new perspective. The ACE loss function exhibits competitive performance to CTC and the attention mechanism, with much quicker implementation (as it involves only four fundamental formulas), faster inference\back-propagation (approximately O(1) in parallel), less storage requirement (no parameter and negligible runtime memory), and convenient employment (by replacing CTC with ACE). Furthermore, the proposed ACE loss function exhibits two noteworthy properties: (1) it can be directly applied for 2D prediction by flattening the 2D prediction into 1D prediction as the input and (2) it requires only characters and their numbers in the sequence annotation for supervision, which allows it to advance beyond sequence recognition, e.g., counting problem. The code is publicly available at https://github.

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