Recognizing irregular text from natural scene images is challenging due to the unconstrained appearance of text, such as curvature, orientation, and distortion. Recent recognition networks regard this task as a text sequence labeling problem and most networks capture the sequence only from a single-granularity visual representation, which to some extent limits the performance of recognition. In this article, we propose a hierarchical attention network to capture multi-granularity deep local representations for recognizing irregular scene text. It consists of several hierarchical attention blocks, and each block contains a Local Visual Representation Module (LVRM) and a Decoder Module (DM). Based on the hierarchical attention network, we propose a scene text recognition network. The extensive experiments show that our proposed network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets including IIIT-5K, SVT, CUTE, SVT-Perspective, and ICDAR datasets under shorter training time.
A holistic representation guided attention network for scene text recognition
