# Revisiting Classification Perspective on Scene Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10884 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10884/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [Attention-Based Models for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.07503/) (2015)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [A Structured Self-attentive Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03130/) (2017)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [PP-OCR: A Practical Ultra Lightweight OCR System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09941/) (2020)
- [Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12294/) (2020)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [Robust Scene Text Recognition with Automatic Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03915/) (2016)
- [SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10977/) (2020)
- [Focusing Attention: Towards Accurate Text Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02054/) (2017)
- [Decoupled Attention Network for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10205/) (2019)
- [ESIR: End-to-end Scene Text Recognition via Iterative Image Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05824/) (2018)
- [NRTR: A No-Recurrence Sequence-to-Sequence Model For Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00926/) (2018)
- [Rosetta: Large scale system for text detection and recognition in images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05085/) (2019)
- [SCATTER: Selective Context Attentional Scene Text Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11288/) (2020)
- [TextScanner: Reading Characters in Order for Robust Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12422/) (2019)
- [MASTER: Multi-Aspect Non-local Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02562/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10282/) (2021)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [Decoder Pre-Training with only Text for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05706/) (2024)
- [An End-to-End Neural Network for Image-to-Audio Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06078/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Scene Text Recognition via Pseudo-Image Labeling and Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07518/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The prevalent perspectives of scene text recognition are from sequence to sequence (seq2seq) and segmentation. Nevertheless, the former is composed of many components which makes implementation and deployment complicated, while the latter requires character level annotations that is expensive. In this paper, we revisit classification perspective that models scene text recognition as an image classification problem. Classification perspective has a simple pipeline and only needs word level annotations. We revive classification perspective by devising a scene text recognition model named as CSTR, which performs as well as methods from other perspectives. The CSTR model consists of CPNet (classification perspective network) and SPPN (separated conv with global average pooling prediction network). CSTR is as simple as image classification model like ResNet citehe2016deep which makes it easy to implement and deploy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the classification perspective on scene text recognition with extensive experiments. Futhermore, CSTR achieves nearly state-of-the-art performance on six public benchmarks including regular text, irregular text. The code will be available at https://github.com/Media-Smart/vedastr.