SynthTIGER: Synthetic Text Image GEneratoR Towards Better Text Recognition Models

Abstract

For successful scene text recognition (STR) models, synthetic text image generators have alleviated the lack of annotated text images from the real world. Specifically, they generate multiple text images with diverse backgrounds, font styles, and text shapes and enable STR models to learn visual patterns that might not be accessible from manually annotated data. In this paper, we introduce a new synthetic text image generator, SynthTIGER, by analyzing techniques used for text image synthesis and integrating effective ones under a single algorithm. Moreover, we propose two techniques that alleviate the long-tail problem in length and character distributions of training data. In our experiments, SynthTIGER achieves better STR performance than the combination of synthetic datasets, MJSynth (MJ) and Synth-Text (ST). Our ablation study demonstrates the benefits of using subcomponents of SynthTIGER and the guideline on generating synthetic text images for STR models. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/clovaai/synthtiger.