# OTSNet: A Neurocognitive-Inspired Observation-Thinking-Spelling Pipeline for Scene Text Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08133 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08133/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06966/) (2022)
- [Towards Accurate Scene Text Recognition with Semantic Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12294/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [SVTR: Scene Text Recognition with a Single Visual Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00159/) (2022)
- [RobustScanner: Dynamically Enhancing Positional Clues for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07542/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformer for Fast and Efficient Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08582/) (2021)
- [NRTR: A No-Recurrence Sequence-to-Sequence Model For Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00926/) (2018)
- [ContourNet: Taking a Further Step toward Accurate Arbitrary-shaped Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04940/) (2020)
- [On Recognizing Texts of Arbitrary Shapes with 2D Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04396/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Scene Text Recognition: A Data Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08723/) (2023)
- [PIMNet: A Parallel, Iterative and Mimicking Network for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04145/) (2021)
- [Multi-Oriented Text Detection with Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04018/) (2016)
- [CDistNet: Perceiving Multi-Domain Character Distance for Robust Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11011/) (2021)
- [Multi-Granularity Prediction for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03592/) (2022)
- [Multi-modal Text Recognition Networks: Interactive Enhancements between Visual and Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15263/) (2021)
- [TextSR: Content-Aware Text Super-Resolution Guided by Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07113/) (2019)
- [DRFN: Deep Recurrent Fusion Network for Single-Image Super-Resolution with Large Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08837/) (2019)
- [SVTRv2: CTC Beats Encoder-Decoder Models in Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15858/) (2024)
- [Edit Probability for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03384/) (2018)
- [Linguistic More: Taking a Further Step toward Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05140/) (2023)
- [Separating Content from Style Using Adversarial Learning for Recognizing Text in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04189/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene Text Recognition (STR) remains challenging due to real-world complexities, where decoupled visual-linguistic optimization in existing frameworks amplifies error propagation through cross-modal misalignment. Visual encoders exhibit attention bias toward background distractors, while decoders suffer from spatial misalignment when parsing geometrically deformed text-collectively degrading recognition accuracy for irregular patterns. Inspired by the hierarchical cognitive processes in human visual perception, we propose OTSNet, a novel three-stage network embodying a neurocognitive-inspired Observation-Thinking-Spelling pipeline for unified STR modeling. The architecture comprises three core components: (1) a Dual Attention Macaron Encoder (DAME) that refines visual features through differential attention maps to suppress irrelevant regions and enhance discriminative focus; (2) a Position-Aware Module (PAM) and Semantic Quantizer (SQ) that jointly integrate spatial context with glyph-level semantic abstraction via adaptive sampling; and (3) a Multi-Modal Collaborative Verifier (MMCV) that enforces self-correction through cross-modal fusion of visual, semantic, and character-level features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OTSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining 83.5% average accuracy on the challenging Union14M-L benchmark and 79.1% on the heavily occluded OST dataset-establishing new records across 9 out of 14 evaluation scenarios.