# Revisiting Scene Text Recognition: A Data Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2023.

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

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Green AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10597/) (2019)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (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)
- [EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03155/) (2017)
- [COCO-Text: Dataset and Benchmark for Text Detection and Recognition in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07140/) (2016)
- [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)
- [TextOCR: Towards large-scale end-to-end reasoning for arbitrary-shaped scene text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05486/) (2021)
- [Total-Text: A Comprehensive Dataset for Scene Text Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10400/) (2017)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Reading Chinese Text on Signboard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09641/) (2019)
- [Reading Text in the Wild with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1842/) (2014)
- [ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07741/) (2019)
- [Mask TextSpotter v3: Segmentation Proposal Network for Robust Scene Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09482/) (2020)
- [ICDAR2017 Competition on Reading Chinese Text in the Wild (RCTW-17)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09585/) (2017)
- [Decoupled Attention Network for Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10205/) (2019)
- [From Two to One: A New Scene Text Recognizer with Visual Language Modeling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09661/) (2021)
- [Towards End-to-End Unified Scene Text Detection and Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15143/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Scene Text Detection with Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10304/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Unified Hallucination Detection for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03190/) (2024)
- [Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16364/) (2024)
- [Multi-modal In-Context Learning Makes an Ego-evolving Scene Text Recognizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13120/) (2023)
- [Exploring OCR Capabilities of GPT-4V(ision) : A Quantitative and In-depth Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16809/) (2023)
- [SVTRv2: CTC Beats Encoder-Decoder Models in Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15858/) (2024)
- [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)
- [UniRec-0.1B: Unified Text and Formula Recognition with 0.1B Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21095/) (2025)
- [IPAD: Iterative, Parallel, and Diffusion-based Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11923/) (2023)
- [Recognition-Synergistic Scene Text Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08387/) (2025)
- [Out of Length Text Recognition with Sub-String Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12317/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Gap Between End-to-End and Two-Step Text Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04624/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-training with Symmetric Superimposition Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05841/) (2024)
- [TextSSR: Diffusion-based Data Synthesis for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01137/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of Scaling Law for OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00028/) (2023)
- [Linguistics-aware Masked Image Modeling for Self-supervised Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18746/) (2025)
- [TextBlockV2: Towards Precise-Detection-Free Scene Text Spotting with Pre-trained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10047/) (2024)
- [MDiff4STR: Mask Diffusion Model for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01422/) (2025)
- [ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22506/) (2026)
- [MonkeyOCRv2: A Visual-Text Foundation Model for Document AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11562/) (2026)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Text Recognition: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19889/) (2024)
- [Decoder Pre-Training with only Text for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05706/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Markup Language Generation for Contextually-Grounded Visual Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05446/) (2025)
- [The Devil is in Fine-tuning and Long-tailed Problems:A New Benchmark for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15649/) (2025)
- [Platypus: A Generalized Specialist Model for Reading Text in Various Forms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14805/) (2024)
- [Boosting Semi-Supervised Scene Text Recognition via Viewing and Summarizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15585/) (2024)
- [What Is Wrong with Synthetic Data for Scene Text Recognition? A Strong Synthetic Engine with Diverse Simulations and Self-Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06450/) (2026)
- [Advancing WordArt-Oriented Scene Text Recognition: Datasets and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24484/) (2026)
- [Focus on the Whole Character: Discriminative Character Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05562/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Text Localization for Scene Text Removal via Text-aware Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13431/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper aims to re-assess scene text recognition (STR) from a data-oriented perspective. We begin by revisiting the six commonly used benchmarks in STR and observe a trend of performance saturation, whereby only 2.91% of the benchmark images cannot be accurately recognized by an ensemble of 13 representative models. While these results are impressive and suggest that STR could be considered solved, however, we argue that this is primarily due to the less challenging nature of the common benchmarks, thus concealing the underlying issues that STR faces. To this end, we consolidate a large-scale real STR dataset, namely Union14M, which comprises 4 million labeled images and 10 million unlabeled images, to assess the performance of STR models in more complex real-world scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that the 13 models can only achieve an average accuracy of 66.53% on the 4 million labeled images, indicating that STR still faces numerous challenges in the real world. By analyzing the error patterns of the 13 models, we identify seven open challenges in STR and develop a challenge-driven benchmark consisting of eight distinct subsets to facilitate further progress in the field. Our exploration demonstrates that STR is far from being solved and leveraging data may be a promising solution. In this regard, we find that utilizing the 10 million unlabeled images through self-supervised pre-training can significantly improve the robustness of STR model in real-world scenarios and leads to state-of-the-art performance.