This paper presents final results of ICDAR 2019 Scene Text Visual Question Answering competition (ST-VQA). ST-VQA introduces an important aspect that is not addressed by any Visual Question Answering system up to date, namely the incorporation of scene text to answer questions asked about an image. The competition introduces a new dataset comprising 23,038 images annotated with 31,791 question/answer pairs where the answer is always grounded on text instances present in the image. The images are taken from 7 different public computer vision datasets, covering a wide range of scenarios. The competition was structured in three tasks of increasing difficulty, that require reading the text in a scene and understanding it in the context of the scene, to correctly answer a given question. A novel evaluation metric is presented, which elegantly assesses both key capabilities expected from an optimal model: text recognition and image understanding. A detailed analysis of results from different participants is showcased, which provides insight into the current capabilities of VQA systems that can read. We firmly believe the dataset proposed in this challenge will be an important milestone to consider towards a path of more robust and general models that can exploit scene text to achieve holistic image understanding.

本文介绍了ICDAR 2019场景文本视觉问答比赛(ST-VQA)的最终结果和新数据集，包括23038张图像和31791个文本实例答案，涵盖广泛的情景。该竞赛共有3个递增的任务，需要理解场景中的文本并回答问题。提出了一种新的评估度量标准，旨在评估文本识别和图像理解两种关键能力。结果分析提供了VQA系统当前的能力洞见。此数据集标志着使用场景文本实现全面图像理解的更强大、更通用的模型的重要里程碑。

ICDAR 2019 场景文本视觉问答竞赛