# Convolutional Character Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07954/

## Key facts

- Cited by 61 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [ABCNet v2: Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network for Real-time End-to-end Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03620/) (2021)
- [DeepSolo: Let Transformer Decoder with Explicit Points Solo for Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10772/) (2022)
- [OmniParser: A Unified Framework for Text Spotting, Key Information Extraction and Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19128/) (2024)
- [SwinTextSpotter: Scene Text Spotting via Better Synergy between Text Detection and Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10209/) (2022)
- [Text Spotting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01918/) (2022)
- [SPTS v2: Single-Point Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01635/) (2023)
- [PAN++: Towards Efficient and Accurate End-to-End Spotting of Arbitrarily-Shaped Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00405/) (2021)
- [PGNet: Real-time Arbitrarily-Shaped Text Spotting with Point Gathering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05458/) (2021)
- [SPTS: Single-Point Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07917/) (2021)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14338/) (2023)
- [Towards Weakly-Supervised Text Spotting using a Multi-Task Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05508/) (2022)
- [ABINet++: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10578/) (2022)
- [CDistNet: Perceiving Multi-Domain Character Distance for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11011/) (2021)
- [Language Matters: A Weakly Supervised Vision-Language Pre-training Approach for Scene Text Detection and Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03911/) (2022)
- [TPSNet: Reverse Thinking of Thin Plate Splines for Arbitrary Shape Scene Text Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12826/) (2021)
- [De-rendering Stylized Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01890/) (2021)
- [OmniParser V2: Structured-Points-of-Thought for Unified Visual Text Parsing and Its Generality to Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16161/) (2025)
- [A Multiplexed Network for End-to-End, Multilingual OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15992/) (2021)
- [Industrial Scene Text Detection with Refined Feature-attentive Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12663/) (2021)
- [Recognition of Handwritten Chinese Text by Segmentation: A Segment-annotation-free Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14801/) (2022)
- [CentripetalText: An Efficient Text Instance Representation for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05945/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Real-Time Scene Text Detection: From Semantic to Instance Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07202/) (2023)
- [DNTextSpotter: Arbitrary-Shaped Scene Text Spotting via Improved Denoising Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00355/) (2024)
- [Arbitrary Reading Order Scene Text Spotter with Local Semantics Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10159/) (2024)
- [SGBANet: Semantic GAN and Balanced Attention Network for Arbitrarily Oriented Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10256/) (2022)
- [Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02737/) (2023)
- [TPS++: Attention-Enhanced Thin-Plate Spline for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05322/) (2023)
- [Turning a CLIP Model into a Scene Text Spotter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10408/) (2023)
- [Inverse-like Antagonistic Scene Text Spotting via Reading-Order Estimation and Dynamic Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03637/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gap Between End-to-End and Two-Step Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04624/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress has been made on developing a unified framework for joint text detection and recognition in natural images, but existing joint models were mostly built on two-stage framework by involving ROI pooling, which can degrade the performance on recognition task. In this work, we propose convolutional character networks, referred as CharNet, which is an one-stage model that can process two tasks simultaneously in one pass. CharNet directly outputs bounding boxes of words and characters, with corresponding character labels. We utilize character as basic element, allowing us to overcome the main difficulty of existing approaches that attempted to optimize text detection jointly with a RNN-based recognition branch. In addition, we develop an iterative character detection approach able to transform the ability of character detection learned from synthetic data to real-world images. These technical improvements result in a simple, compact, yet powerful one-stage model that works reliably on multi-orientation and curved text. We evaluate CharNet on three standard benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches [25, 24] by a large margin, e.g., with improvements of 65.33%->71.08% (with generic lexicon) on ICDAR 2015, and 54.0%->69.23% on Total-Text, on end-to-end text recognition. Code is available at: https://github.com/MalongTech/research-charnet.