# SGBANet: Semantic GAN and Balanced Attention Network for Arbitrarily Oriented Scene Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10256 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10256/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Scene Text Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13648/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10977/) (2020)
- [Mask TextSpotter v3: Segmentation Proposal Network for Robust Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09482/) (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)
- [RobustScanner: Dynamically Enhancing Positional Clues for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07542/) (2020)
- [ESIR: End-to-end Scene Text Recognition via Iterative Image Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05824/) (2018)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Contrastive Learning for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10873/) (2020)
- [DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03064/) (2021)
- [TextScanner: Reading Characters in Order for Robust Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12422/) (2019)
- [Scene Text Image Super-Resolution in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03341/) (2020)
- [What If We Only Use Real Datasets for Scene Text Recognition? Toward Scene Text Recognition With Fewer Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04400/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Character Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07954/) (2019)
- [Scene Text Recognition from Two-Dimensional Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06508/) (2018)
- [GTC: Guided Training of CTC Towards Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01276/) (2020)
- [Controllable Artistic Text Style Transfer via Shape-Matching GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01354/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Exploring OCR Capabilities of GPT-4V(ision) : A Quantitative and In-depth Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16809/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Character-to-Character Distillation for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00288/) (2022)
- [Context Perception Parallel Decoder for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12270/) (2023)
- [Instruction-Guided Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17851/) (2024)
- [LISTER: Neighbor Decoding for Length-Insensitive Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12774/) (2023)
- [IPAD: Iterative, Parallel, and Diffusion-based Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11923/) (2023)
- [Class-Aware Mask-Guided Feature Refinement for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13643/) (2024)
- [TPS++: Attention-Enhanced Thin-Plate Spline for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05322/) (2023)
- [CMFN: Cross-Modal Fusion Network for Irregular Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10041/) (2024)
- [Joint Low-level and High-level Textual Representation Learning with Multiple Masking Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06855/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene text recognition is a challenging task due to the complex backgrounds and diverse variations of text instances. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic GAN and Balanced Attention Network (SGBANet) to recognize the texts in scene images. The proposed method first generates the simple semantic feature using Semantic GAN and then recognizes the scene text with the Balanced Attention Module. The Semantic GAN aims to align the semantic feature distribution between the support domain and target domain. Different from the conventional image-to-image translation methods that perform at the image level, the Semantic GAN performs the generation and discrimination on the semantic level with the Semantic Generator Module (SGM) and Semantic Discriminator Module (SDM). For target images (scene text images), the Semantic Generator Module generates simple semantic features that share the same feature distribution with support images (clear text images). The Semantic Discriminator Module is used to distinguish the semantic features between the support domain and target domain. In addition, a Balanced Attention Module is designed to alleviate the problem of attention drift. The Balanced Attention Module first learns a balancing parameter based on the visual glimpse vector and semantic glimpse vector, and then performs the balancing operation for obtaining a balanced glimpse vector. Experiments on six benchmarks, including regular datasets, i.e., IIIT5K, SVT, ICDAR2013, and irregular datasets, i.e., ICDAR2015, SVTP, CUTE80, validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.