Vision Transformer for Fast and Efficient Scene Text Recognition (ICDAR 2021)

ViTSTR is a simple single-stage model that uses a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) to perform Scene Text Recognition (ViTSTR). It has a comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art STR models although it uses significantly less number of parameters and FLOPS. ViTSTR is also fast due to the parallel computation inherent to ViT architecture.

Paper

Arxiv

ViTSTR is built using a fork of CLOVA AI Deep Text Recognition Benchmark whose original documentation is at the bottom. Below we document how to train and evaluate ViTSTR-Tiny and ViTSTR-small.

Install requirements

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Dataset

Download lmdb dataset. See CLOVA AI original documentation below.

Quick validation using a pre-trained model

ViTSTR-Small

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 test.py --eval_data data_lmdb_release/evaluation 
--benchmark_all_eval --Transformation None --FeatureExtraction None 
--SequenceModeling None --Prediction None --Transformer
--sensitive --data_filtering_off  --imgH 224 --imgW 224
--TransformerModel=vitstr_small_patch16_224 --saved_model 
https://github.com/roatienza/deep-text-recognition-benchmark/releases/download/v0.1.0/vitstr_small_patch16_224_aug.pth 

Available model weights:

Tiny	Small	Base
vitstr_tiny_patch16_224	vitstr_small_patch16_224	vitstr_base_patch16_224
ViTSTR-Tiny	ViTSTR-Small	ViTSTR-Base
ViTSTR-Tiny+Aug	ViTSTR-Small+Aug	ViTSTR-Base+Aug

Benchmarks (Top 1% accuracy)

Model	IIIT	SVT	IC03	IC03	IC13	IC13	IC15	IC15	SVTP	CT	Acc	Std
	3000	647	860	867	857	1015	1811	2077	645	288	%	%
TRBA (Baseline)	87.7	87.4	94.5	94.2	93.4	92.1	77.3	71.6	78.1	75.5	84.3	0.1
ViTSTR-Tiny	83.7	83.2	92.8	92.5	90.8	89.3	72.0	66.4	74.5	65.0	80.3	0.2
ViTSTR-Tiny+Aug	85.1	85.0	93.4	93.2	90.9	89.7	74.7	68.9	78.3	74.2	82.1	0.1
ViTSTR-Small	85.6	85.3	93.9	93.6	91.7	90.6	75.3	69.5	78.1	71.3	82.6	0.3
ViTSTR-Small+Aug	86.6	87.3	94.2	94.2	92.1	91.2	77.9	71.7	81.4	77.9	84.2	0.1
ViTSTR-Base	86.9	87.2	93.8	93.4	92.1	91.3	76.8	71.1	80.0	74.7	83.7	0.1
ViTSTR-Base+Aug	88.4	87.7	94.7	94.3	93.2	92.4	78.5	72.6	81.8	81.3	85.2	0.1

Comparison with other STR models

Accuracy vs Number of Parameters

Accuracy vs Speed (2080Ti GPU)

Accuracy vs FLOPS

Train

ViTSTR-Tiny without data augmentation

RANDOM=$$

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 train.py --train_data data_lmdb_release/training
--valid_data data_lmdb_release/evaluation --select_data MJ-ST 
--batch_ratio 0.5-0.5 --Transformation None --FeatureExtraction None 
--SequenceModeling None --Prediction None --Transformer 
--TransformerModel=vitstr_tiny_patch16_224 --imgH 224 --imgW 224 
--manualSeed=$RANDOM  --sensitive

Multi-GPU training

ViTSTR-Small on a 4-GPU machine

It is recommended to train larger networks like ViTSTR-Small and ViTSTR-Base on a multi-GPU machine. To keep a fixed batch size at 192, use the --batch_size option. Divide 192 by the number of GPUs. For example, to train ViTSTR-Small on a 4-GPU machine, this would be --batch_size=48.

python3 train.py --train_data data_lmdb_release/training 
--valid_data data_lmdb_release/evaluation --select_data MJ-ST 
--batch_ratio 0.5-0.5 --Transformation None --FeatureExtraction None 
--SequenceModeling None --Prediction None --Transformer 
--TransformerModel=vitstr_small_patch16_224 --imgH 224 --imgW 224 
--manualSeed=$RANDOM --sensitive --batch_size=48

Data augmentation

ViTSTR-Tiny using rand augment

It is recommended to use more workers (eg from default of 4, use 32 instead) since the data augmentation process is CPU intensive. In determining the number of workers, a simple rule of thumb to follow is it can be set to a value between 25% to 50% of the total number of CPU cores. For example, for a system with 64 CPU cores, the number of workers can be set to 32 to use 50% of all cores. For multi-GPU systems, the number of workers must be divided by the number of GPUs. For example, for 32 workers in a 4-GPU system, --workers=8. For convenience, simply use --workers=-1, 50% of all cores will be used. Lastly, instead of using a constant learning rate, a cosine scheduler improves the performance of the model during training.

Below is a sample configuration for a 4-GPU system using batch size of 192.

python3 train.py --train_data data_lmdb_release/training
--valid_data data_lmdb_release/evaluation --select_data MJ-ST 
--batch_ratio 0.5-0.5 --Transformation None --FeatureExtraction None 
--SequenceModeling None --Prediction None --Transformer 
--TransformerModel=vitstr_tiny_patch16_224 --imgH 224 --imgW 224 
--manualSeed=$RANDOM  --sensitive
--batch_size=48 --isrand_aug --workers=-1 --scheduler

Test

ViTSTR-Tiny. Find the path to best_accuracy.pth checkpoint file (usually in saved_model folder).

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 test.py --eval_data data_lmdb_release/evaluation 
--benchmark_all_eval --Transformation None --FeatureExtraction None  
--SequenceModeling None --Prediction None --Transformer 
--TransformerModel=vitstr_tiny_patch16_224 
--sensitive --data_filtering_off  --imgH 224 --imgW 224
--saved_model <path_to/best_accuracy.pth>

Citation

If you find this work useful, please cite:

@inproceedings{atienza2021vitstr,
  title={Vision Transformer for Fast and Efficient Scene Text Recognition},
  author={Atienza, Rowel},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)},
  year={2021},
  pubstate={published},
  tppubtype={inproceedings}
}

What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis

| paper | training and evaluation data | failure cases and cleansed label | pretrained model | Baidu ver(passwd:rryk) |

Official PyTorch implementation of our four-stage STR framework, that most existing STR models fit into.
Using this framework allows for the module-wise contributions to performance in terms of accuracy, speed, and memory demand, under one consistent set of training and evaluation datasets.
Such analyses clean up the hindrance on the current comparisons to understand the performance gain of the existing modules.

Honors

Based on this framework, we recorded the 1st place of ICDAR2013 focused scene text, ICDAR2019 ArT and 3rd place of ICDAR2017 COCO-Text, ICDAR2019 ReCTS (task1).
The difference between our paper and ICDAR challenge is summarized here.

Updates

Aug 3, 2020: added guideline to use Baidu warpctc which reproduces CTC results of our paper.
Dec 27, 2019: added FLOPS in our paper, and minor updates such as log_dataset.txt and ICDAR2019-NormalizedED.
Oct 22, 2019: added confidence score, and arranged the output form of training logs.
Jul 31, 2019: The paper is accepted at International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Seoul 2019, as an oral talk.
Jul 25, 2019: The code for floating-point 16 calculation, check @YacobBY's pull request
Jul 16, 2019: added ST_spe.zip dataset, word images contain special characters in SynthText (ST) dataset, see this issue
Jun 24, 2019: added gt.txt of failure cases that contains path and label of each image, see image_release_190624.zip
May 17, 2019: uploaded resources in Baidu Netdisk also, added Run demo. (check @sharavsambuu's colab demo also)
May 9, 2019: PyTorch version updated from 1.0.1 to 1.1.0, use torch.nn.CTCLoss instead of torch-baidu-ctc, and various minor updated.

Getting Started

Dependency

• This work was tested with PyTorch 1.3.1, CUDA 10.1, python 3.6 and Ubuntu 16.04.
  You may need pip3 install torch==1.3.1.
  In the paper, expriments were performed with PyTorch 0.4.1, CUDA 9.0.
• requirements : lmdb, pillow, torchvision, nltk, natsort

pip3 install lmdb pillow torchvision nltk natsort

Download lmdb dataset for traininig and evaluation from here

data_lmdb_release.zip contains below.
training datasets : MJSynth (MJ)[1] and SynthText (ST)[2]
validation datasets : the union of the training sets IC13[3], IC15[4], IIIT[5], and SVT[6].
evaluation datasets : benchmark evaluation datasets, consist of IIIT[5], SVT[6], IC03[7], IC13[3], IC15[4], SVTP[8], and CUTE[9].

Run demo with pretrained model

1. Download pretrained model from here
2. Add image files to test into demo_image/
3. Run demo.py (add --sensitive option if you use case-sensitive model)

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 demo.py \
--Transformation TPS --FeatureExtraction ResNet --SequenceModeling BiLSTM --Prediction Attn \
--image_folder demo_image/ \
--saved_model TPS-ResNet-BiLSTM-Attn.pth

prediction results

demo images	TRBA (TPS-ResNet-BiLSTM-Attn)	TRBA (case-sensitive version)
	available	Available
	shakeshack	SHARESHACK
	london	Londen
	greenstead	Greenstead
	toast	TOAST
	merry	MERRY
	underground	underground
	ronaldo	RONALDO
	bally	BALLY
	university	UNIVERSITY

Training and evaluation

1. Train CRNN[10] model

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 train.py \
--train_data data_lmdb_release/training --valid_data data_lmdb_release/validation \
--select_data MJ-ST --batch_ratio 0.5-0.5 \
--Transformation None --FeatureExtraction VGG --SequenceModeling BiLSTM --Prediction CTC

2. Test CRNN[10] model. If you want to evaluate IC15-2077, check data filtering part.

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 test.py \
--eval_data data_lmdb_release/evaluation --benchmark_all_eval \
--Transformation None --FeatureExtraction VGG --SequenceModeling BiLSTM --Prediction CTC \
--saved_model saved_models/None-VGG-BiLSTM-CTC-Seed1111/best_accuracy.pth

3. Try to train and test our best accuracy model TRBA (TPS-ResNet-BiLSTM-Attn) also. (download pretrained model)

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 train.py \
--train_data data_lmdb_release/training --valid_data data_lmdb_release/validation \
--select_data MJ-ST --batch_ratio 0.5-0.5 \
--Transformation TPS --FeatureExtraction ResNet --SequenceModeling BiLSTM --Prediction Attn

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python3 test.py \
--eval_data data_lmdb_release/evaluation --benchmark_all_eval \
--Transformation TPS --FeatureExtraction ResNet --SequenceModeling BiLSTM --Prediction Attn \
--saved_model saved_models/TPS-ResNet-BiLSTM-Attn-Seed1111/best_accuracy.pth

Arguments

• --train_data: folder path to training lmdb dataset.
• --valid_data: folder path to validation lmdb dataset.
• --eval_data: folder path to evaluation (with test.py) lmdb dataset.
• --select_data: select training data. default is MJ-ST, which means MJ and ST used as training data.
• --batch_ratio: assign ratio for each selected data in the batch. default is 0.5-0.5, which means 50% of the batch is filled with MJ and the other 50% of the batch is filled ST.
• --data_filtering_off: skip data filtering when creating LmdbDataset.
• --Transformation: select Transformation module [None | TPS].
• --FeatureExtraction: select FeatureExtraction module [VGG | RCNN | ResNet].
• --SequenceModeling: select SequenceModeling module [None | BiLSTM].
• --Prediction: select Prediction module [CTC | Attn].
• --saved_model: assign saved model to evaluation.
• --benchmark_all_eval: evaluate with 10 evaluation dataset versions, same with Table 1 in our paper.

Download failure cases and cleansed label from here

image_release.zip contains failure case images and benchmark evaluation images with cleansed label.

When you need to train on your own dataset or Non-Latin language datasets.

1. Create your own lmdb dataset.

pip3 install fire
python3 create_lmdb_dataset.py --inputPath data/ --gtFile data/gt.txt --outputPath result/

The structure of data folder as below.

data
├── gt.txt
└── test
    ├── word_1.png
    ├── word_2.png
    ├── word_3.png
    └── ...

At this time, gt.txt should be {imagepath}\t{label}\n
For example

test/word_1.png Tiredness
test/word_2.png kills
test/word_3.png A
...

2. Modify --select_data, --batch_ratio, and opt.character, see this issue.

Acknowledgements

This implementation has been based on these repository crnn.pytorch, ocr_attention.

Reference

[1] M. Jaderberg, K. Simonyan, A. Vedaldi, and A. Zisserman. Synthetic data and artificial neural networks for natural scenetext recognition. In Workshop on Deep Learning, NIPS, 2014.
[2] A. Gupta, A. Vedaldi, and A. Zisserman. Synthetic data fortext localisation in natural images. In CVPR, 2016.
[3] D. Karatzas, F. Shafait, S. Uchida, M. Iwamura, L. G. i Big-orda, S. R. Mestre, J. Mas, D. F. Mota, J. A. Almazan, andL. P. De Las Heras. ICDAR 2013 robust reading competition. In ICDAR, pages 1484–1493, 2013.
[4] D. Karatzas, L. Gomez-Bigorda, A. Nicolaou, S. Ghosh, A. Bagdanov, M. Iwamura, J. Matas, L. Neumann, V. R.Chandrasekhar, S. Lu, et al. ICDAR 2015 competition on ro-bust reading. In ICDAR, pages 1156–1160, 2015.
[5] A. Mishra, K. Alahari, and C. Jawahar. Scene text recognition using higher order language priors. In BMVC, 2012.
[6] K. Wang, B. Babenko, and S. Belongie. End-to-end scenetext recognition. In ICCV, pages 1457–1464, 2011.
[7] S. M. Lucas, A. Panaretos, L. Sosa, A. Tang, S. Wong, andR. Young. ICDAR 2003 robust reading competitions. In ICDAR, pages 682–687, 2003.
[8] T. Q. Phan, P. Shivakumara, S. Tian, and C. L. Tan. Recognizing text with perspective distortion in natural scenes. In ICCV, pages 569–576, 2013.
[9] A. Risnumawan, P. Shivakumara, C. S. Chan, and C. L. Tan. A robust arbitrary text detection system for natural scene images. In ESWA, volume 41, pages 8027–8048, 2014.
[10] B. Shi, X. Bai, and C. Yao. An end-to-end trainable neural network for image-based sequence recognition and its application to scene text recognition. In TPAMI, volume 39, pages2298–2304. 2017.

Links

• WebDemo : https://demo.ocr.clova.ai/
  Combination of Clova AI detection and recognition, additional/advanced features used for KOR/JPN.
• Repo of detection : https://github.com/clovaai/CRAFT-pytorch

Citation

Please consider citing this work in your publications if it helps your research.

@inproceedings{baek2019STRcomparisons,
  title={What Is Wrong With Scene Text Recognition Model Comparisons? Dataset and Model Analysis},
  author={Baek, Jeonghun and Kim, Geewook and Lee, Junyeop and Park, Sungrae and Han, Dongyoon and Yun, Sangdoo and Oh, Seong Joon and Lee, Hwalsuk},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
  year={2019},
  pubstate={published},
  tppubtype={inproceedings}
}

Contact

Feel free to contact us if there is any question:
for code/paper Jeonghun Baek [email protected]; for collaboration [email protected] (our team leader).

License

Copyright (c) 2019-present NAVER Corp.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.