Image-based sequence recognition has been a long-standing research topic in
computer vision. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text
recognition, which is among the most important and challenging tasks in
image-based sequence recognition. A novel neural network architecture, which
integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a
unified framework, is proposed. Compared with previous systems for scene text
recognition, the proposed architecture possesses four distinctive properties:
(1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most of the existing algorithms
whose components are separately trained and tuned. (2) It naturally handles
sequences in arbitrary lengths, involving no character segmentation or
horizontal scale normalization. (3) It is not confined to any predefined
lexicon and achieves remarkable performances in both lexicon-free and
lexicon-based scene text recognition tasks. (4) It generates an effective yet
much smaller model, which is more practical for real-world application
scenarios. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K,
Street View Text and ICDAR datasets, demonstrate the superiority of the
proposed algorithm over the prior arts. Moreover, the proposed algorithm
performs well in the task of image-based music score recognition, which
evidently verifies the generality of it.

本文提出了一种新颖的神经网络架构，将特征提取、序列建模和转录集成到统一框架中，用于场景文本识别，相比现有算法其具有端到端训练，不需要一定的词典限制，更加适合实际应用等优点，在标准测试数据上展现出更好的性能。