Confident sequence learning: A sequence class-label noise filtering technique to improve scene digit recognition

Reading digits from natural images is a challenging computer vision task central to a variety of emerging applications. However, the increased scalability and complexity of datasets or complex applications bring about inevitable label noise. Because the label noise in the scene digit recognition dataset is sequence-like, most existing methods cannot deal with label noise in scene digit recognition. We propose a novel sequence class-label noise filter called Confident Sequence Learning. Confident Sequence Learning consists of two critical parts: the sequence-like confidence segmentation algorithm and the Confident Learning method. The sequence-like confidence segmentation algorithms slice the sequence-like labels and the sequence-like predicted probabilities, reorganize them in the form of the independent stochastic process and the white noise process. The Confident Learning method estimates the joint distribution between observed labels and latent labels using the segmented labels and probabilities. The TRDG dataset and SVHN dataset experiments showed that the confident sequence learning could find label errors with high accuracy and significantly improve the VGG-Attn and the TPS-ResNet-Attn model’s performance in the presence of synthetic sequence class-label noise.