From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer with Visual Language Modeling Network

The official code of VisionLAN (ICCV2021). VisionLAN successfully achieves the transformation from two-step to one-step recognition (from Two to One), which adaptively considers both visual and linguistic information in a unified structure without the need of extra language model.

ToDo List

• Release code
• Document for Installation
• Trained models
• Document for testing and training
• Evaluation
• re-organize and clean the parameters

Updates

2021/10/9 We upload the code, datasets, and trained models.
2021/10/9 Fix a bug in cfs_LF_1.py.
2021/10/12 Correct the typo in train.py

Requirements

Python2.7
Colour
LMDB
Pillow
opencv-python
torch==1.3.0
torchvision==0.4.1
editdistance
matplotlib==2.2.5

Step-by-step install

pip install -r requirements.txt

Data preparing

Training sets

SynthText We use the tool to crop images from original SynthText dataset, and convert images into LMDB dataset.

MJSynth We use tool to convert images into LMDB dataset. (We only use training set in this implementation)

We have upload these LMDB datasets in RuiKe (password:x6si) or BaiduYun(password:z0r5)

Testing sets

Evaluation datasets, LMDB datasets can be downloaded from BaiduYun (password:fjyy) or RuiKe(password:q8w0)

IIIT5K Words (IIIT5K)
ICDAR 2013 (IC13)
Street View Text (SVT)
ICDAR 2015 (IC15)
Street View Text-Perspective (SVTP)
CUTE80 (CUTE)

The structure of data directory is

datasets
├── evaluation
│   ├── Sumof6benchmarks
│   ├── CUTE
│   ├── IC13
│   ├── IC15
│   ├── IIIT5K
│   ├── SVT
│   └── SVTP
└── train
    ├── MJSynth
    └── SynthText

Evaluation

Results on 6 benchmarks

Methods	IIIT5K	IC13	SVT	IC15	SVTP	CUTE
Paper	95.8	95.7	91.7	83.7	86.0	88.5
This implementation	95.9	96.3	90.7	84.1	85.3	88.9

Download our trained model in BaiduYun (password: e3kj) or RuiKe (password: cxqi), and put it in output/LA/final.pth.

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python eval.py

Visualize character-wise mask map

Examples of the visualization of mask_c:

   CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python visualize.py

You can modify the 'mask_id' in cfgs/cfgs_visualize to change the P for visualization.

Results on OST datasets

Occlusion Scene Text (OST) dataset is proposed to reflect the ability for recognizing cases with missing visual cues. This dataset is collected from 6 benchmarks (IC13, IC15, IIIT5K, SVT, SVTP and CT) containing 4832 images. Images in this dataset are manually occluded in weak or heavy degree. Weak and heavy degrees mean that we occlude the character using one or two lines. For each image, we randomly choose one degree to only cover one character.

Examples of images in OST dataset:

Methods	Average	Weak	Heavy
Paper	60.3	70.3	50.3
This implementation	60.3	70.8	49.8

The LMDB dataset is available in BaiduYun (password:yrrj) or RuiKe (password: vmzr)

Training

4 2080Ti GPUs are used in this implementation.

Language-free (LF) process

You can follow this implementation to train your own vision model.

Step 1 (LF_1): We first train the vision model without MLM.

   CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1,2,3 python train_LF_1.py

We provide our trained LF_1 model in BaiduYun (password:avs5) and RuiKe (password:qwzn))

Step 2 (LF_2): We finetune the MLM with vision model.

   CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1,2,3 python train_LF_2.py

Language-aware (LA) process

Download our trained LF_2 model (BaiduYun) (password:04jg) or RuiKe (password:v67q), and put it in /output/LF_2/LF_2.pth.

Then

   CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1,2,3 python train_LA.py

Tips: In LA process, model with loss (Loss VisionLAN) higher than 0.3 and the training accuracy (Accuracy) lower than 91.0 after the first 200 training iters obains better performance.

Improvement

1. Mask id randomly generated according to the max length can not well adapt to the occlusion of long text. Thus, evenly sampled mask id can further improve the performance of MLM.
2. Heavier vision model is able to capture more robust linguistic information in our later experiments.

Citation

If you find our method useful for your reserach, please cite

@inproceedings{wang2021two,
  title={From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer with Visual Language Modeling Network},
  author={Wang, Yuxin and Xie, Hongtao and Fang, Shancheng and Wang, Jing and Zhu, Shenggao and Zhang, Yongdong},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision},
  pages={14194--14203},
  year={2021}
}

Feedback

Suggestions and discussions are greatly welcome. Please contact the authors by sending email to wangyx58@mail.ustc.edu.cn