# I2C2W: Image-to-Character-to-Word Transformers for Accurate Scene Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08383 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08383/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [Mask TextSpotter: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Spotting Text with Arbitrary Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08207/) (2019)
- [Total-Text: A Comprehensive Dataset for Scene Text Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10400/) (2017)
- [All Tokens Matter: Token Labeling for Training Better Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10858/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Reading Text in the Wild with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1842/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Decoupled Attention Network for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10205/) (2019)

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

- [Accelerating DETR Convergence via Semantic-Aligned Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06883/) (2022)
- [Context Perception Parallel Decoder for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12270/) (2023)
- [Diving into the Depths of Spotting Text in Multi-Domain Noisy Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00558/) (2023)
- [Relaxed syntax modeling in Transformers for future-proof license plate recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17051/) (2025)
- [HAAP: Vision-context Hierarchical Attention Autoregressive with Adaptive Permutation for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09125/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Leveraging the advances of natural language processing, most recent scene text recognizers adopt an encoder-decoder architecture where text images are first converted to representative features and then a sequence of characters via `sequential decoding'. However, scene text images suffer from rich noises of different sources such as complex background and geometric distortions which often confuse the decoder and lead to incorrect alignment of visual features at noisy decoding time steps. This paper presents I2C2W, a novel scene text recognition technique that is tolerant to geometric and photometric degradation by decomposing scene text recognition into two inter-connected tasks. The first task focuses on image-to-character (I2C) mapping which detects a set of character candidates from images based on different alignments of visual features in an non-sequential way. The second task tackles character-to-word (C2W) mapping which recognizes scene text by decoding words from the detected character candidates. The direct learning from character semantics (instead of noisy image features) corrects falsely detected character candidates effectively which improves the final text recognition accuracy greatly. Extensive experiments over nine public datasets show that the proposed I2C2W outperforms the state-of-the-art by large margins for challenging scene text datasets with various curvature and perspective distortions. It also achieves very competitive recognition performance over multiple normal scene text datasets.