# Accurate, Data-Efficient, Unconstrained Text Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11894/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [HTR-VT: Handwritten Text Recognition with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08573/) (2024)
- [SPAN: a Simple Predict & Align Network for Handwritten Paragraph Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08742/) (2021)
- [The LAM Dataset: A Novel Benchmark for Line-Level Handwritten Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07682/) (2022)
- [Best Practices for a Handwritten Text Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11339/) (2024)
- [Boosting Modern and Historical Handwritten Text Recognition with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08109/) (2022)
- [Star Temporal Classification: Sequence Classification with Partially Labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12208/) (2022)
- [Faster DAN: Multi-target Queries with Document Positional Encoding for End-to-end Handwritten Document Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10593/) (2023)
- [GP-NAS-ensemble: a model for NAS Performance Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09231/) (2023)
- [Qalam : A Multimodal LLM for Arabic Optical Character and Handwriting Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13559/) (2024)
- [Auxiliary Cross-Modal Representation Learning with Triplet Loss Functions for Online Handwriting Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07901/) (2022)
- [Easter2.0: Improving convolutional models for handwritten text recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14879/) (2022)
- [HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13761/) (2024)
- [Lexicon and Attention based Handwritten Text Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04817/) (2022)
- [QARI-OCR: High-Fidelity Arabic Text Recognition through Multimodal Large Language Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02295/) (2025)
- [General Detection-based Text Line Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17095/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Text Recognition: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19889/) (2024)
- [A Human-in-the-Loop Label Error Detection Framework Applied to Arabic-Script HTR Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16713/) (2026)
- [2D Self-Organized ONN Model For Handwritten Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08139/) (2022)
- [A Lexicon and Depth-wise Separable Convolution Based Handwritten Text Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04651/) (2022)
- [Combining OCR Models for Reading Early Modern Printed Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07131/) (2023)
- [IDPL-PFOD2: A New Large-Scale Dataset for Printed Farsi Optical Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01177/) (2023)
- [GatedLexiconNet: A Comprehensive End-to-End Handwritten Paragraph Text Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14062/) (2024)
- [HTR-ConvText: Leveraging Convolution and Textual Information for Handwritten Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05021/) (2025)
- [ConAM: Confidence Attention Module for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14369/) (2021)
- [TextMatcher: Cross-Attentional Neural Network to Compare Image and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05507/) (2022)
- [Towards Robust Handwritten Text Recognition with On-the-fly User Participation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08834/) (2022)
- [Offline Detection of Misspelled Handwritten Words by Convolving Recognition Model Features with Text Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10158/) (2023)
- [Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04091/) (2023)
- [Boosting CNN-based Handwriting Recognition Systems with Learnable Relaxation Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05699/) (2024)
- [Enhancement of text recognition for hanja handwritten documents of Ancient Korea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10647/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unconstrained text recognition is an important computer vision task, featuring a wide variety of different sub-tasks, each with its own set of challenges. One of the biggest promises of deep neural networks has been the convergence and automation of feature extractors from input raw signals, allowing for the highest possible performance with minimum required domain knowledge. To this end, we propose a data-efficient, end-to-end neural network model for generic, unconstrained text recognition. In our proposed architecture we strive for simplicity and efficiency without sacrificing recognition accuracy. Our proposed architecture is a fully convolutional network without any recurrent connections trained with the CTC loss function. Thus it operates on arbitrary input sizes and produces strings of arbitrary length in a very efficient and parallelizable manner. We show the generality and superiority of our proposed text recognition architecture by achieving state of the art results on seven public benchmark datasets, covering a wide spectrum of text recognition tasks, namely: Handwriting Recognition, CAPTCHA recognition, OCR, License Plate Recognition, and Scene Text Recognition. Our proposed architecture has won the ICFHR2018 Competition on Automated Text Recognition on a READ Dataset.