Scene Text Recognition via Dual-path Network with Shape-driven Attention Alignment

Scene text recognition (STR), one typical sequence-to-sequence problem, has drawn much attention recently in multimedia applications. To guarantee good performance, it is essential for STR to obtain aligned character-wise features from the whole-image feature maps. While most present works adopt fully data-driven attention-based alignment, such practice ignores specific character geometric information. In this article, built upon a group of learnable geometric points, we propose a novel shape-driven attention alignment method that is able to obtain character-wise features. Concretely, we first design a corner detector to generate a shape map to guide the attention alignments explicitly, where a series of points can be learned to represent character-wise features flexibly. We then propose a dual-path network with a mutual learning and cooperating strategy that successfully combines CNN with a ViT-based model, leading to further accuracy improvement. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed method on various scene text benchmarks, including six popular regular and irregular datasets, two more challenging datasets (i.e., WordArt and OST), and three Chinese datasets. Experimental results indicate that our method can achieve superior performance with a comparable model size against many state-of-the-art models.