Training text recognition systems

Abstract

In implementations of recognizing text in images, text recognition systems are trained using noisy images that have nuisance factors applied, and corresponding clean images (e.g., without nuisance factors). Clean images serve as supervision at both feature and pixel levels, so that text recognition systems are trained to be feature invariant (e.g., by requiring features extracted from a noisy image to match features extracted from a clean image), and feature complete (e.g., by requiring that features extracted from a noisy image be sufficient to generate a clean image). Accordingly, text recognition systems generalize to text not included in training images, and are robust to nuisance factors. Furthermore, since clean images are provided as supervision at feature and pixel levels, training requires fewer training images than text recognition systems that are not trained with a supervisory clean image, thus saving time and resources.