# Generating Synthetic Data for Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.04224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10282/) (2021)
- [Asking questions on handwritten document collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00711/) (2021)
- [Handwritten Text Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08417/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Scene Text Recognition in Devanagari, Telugu and Malayalam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04437/) (2021)
- [On the Generalization of Handwritten Text Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17332/) (2024)
- [FedSyn: Synthetic Data Generation using Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05931/) (2022)
- [UIT-HWDB: Using Transferring Method to Construct A Novel Benchmark for Evaluating Unconstrained Handwriting Image Recognition in Vietnamese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05407/) (2022)
- [PSGText: Stroke-Guided Scene Text Editing with PSP Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13366/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Adaptation of Diffusion Models for Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15853/) (2024)
- [The MERIT Dataset: Modelling and Efficiently Rendering Interpretable Transcripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00447/) (2024)
- [Improving OCR for Historical Texts of Multiple Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10356/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating synthetic images is an art which emulates the natural process of image generation in a closest possible manner. In this work, we exploit such a framework for data generation in handwritten domain. We render synthetic data using open source fonts and incorporate data augmentation schemes. As part of this work, we release 9M synthetic handwritten word image corpus which could be useful for training deep network architectures and advancing the performance in handwritten word spotting and recognition tasks.