# Reading Chinese in Natural Scenes with a Bag-of-Radicals Prior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02576 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02576/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01906/) (2019)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text (RRC-ArT)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07145/) (2019)
- [ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition -- RRC-MLT-2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00945/) (2019)
- [Show, Attend and Read: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Irregular Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00751/) (2018)
- [ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09641/) (2019)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07741/) (2019)
- [Robust Scene Text Recognition with Automatic Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03915/) (2016)
- [ICDAR2017 Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild (RCTW-17)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09585/) (2017)
- [RobustScanner: Dynamically Enhancing Positional Clues for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07542/) (2020)
- [Recursive Recurrent Nets with Attention Modeling for OCR in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03101/) (2016)
- [Rosetta: Large scale system for text detection and recognition in images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05085/) (2019)
- [Few-shot Font Generation with Localized Style Representations and Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11042/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Compositional Font Generation with Dual Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10510/) (2020)
- [MMOCR: A Comprehensive Toolbox for Text Detection, Recognition and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06543/) (2021)
- [Omnidirectional Scene Text Detection with Sequential-free Box Discretization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02371/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Chinese Character Recognition with Stroke-Level Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11613/) (2021)
- [DenseRAN for Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04134/) (2018)
- [Gaussian Constrained Attention Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09169/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Capacity of an Orderless Box Discretization Network for Multi-orientation Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09629/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene text recognition (STR) on Latin datasets has been extensively studied in recent years, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) models often reach high accuracy. However, the performance on non-Latin transcripts, such as Chinese, is not satisfactory. In this paper, we collect six open-source Chinese STR datasets and evaluate a series of classic methods performing well on Latin datasets, finding a significant performance drop. To improve the performance on Chinese datasets, we propose a novel radical-embedding (RE) representation to utilize the ideographic descriptions of Chinese characters. The ideographic descriptions of Chinese characters are firstly converted to bags of radicals and then fused with learnable character embeddings by a character-vector-fusion-module (CVFM). In addition, we utilize a bag of radicals as supervision signals for multi-task training to improve the ideographic structure perception of our model. Experiments show performance of the model with RE + CVFM + multi-task training is superior compared with the baseline on six Chinese STR datasets. In addition, we utilize a bag of radicals as supervision signals for multi-task training to improve the ideographic structure perception of our model. Experiments show performance of the model with RE + CVFM + multi-task training is superior compared with the baseline on six Chinese STR datasets.