Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable visual and linguistic capabilities, achieving impressive performance in various tasks such as image recognition and object localization. However, their effectiveness in fine-grained tasks remains an open question. In everyday scenarios, individuals encountering design materials, such as magazines, typography tutorials, research papers, or branding content, may wish to identify aesthetically pleasing fonts used in the text. Given their multimodal capabilities and free accessibility, many VLMs are often considered potential tools for font recognition. This raises a fundamental question: Do VLMs truly possess the capability to recognize fonts? To investigate this, we introduce the Font Recognition Benchmark (FRB), a compact and well-structured dataset comprising 15 commonly used fonts. FRB includes two versions: (i) an easy version, where 10 sentences are rendered in different fonts, and (ii) a hard version, where each text sample consists of the names of the 15 fonts themselves, introducing a stroop effect that challenges model perception. Through extensive evaluation of various VLMs on font recognition tasks, we arrive at the following key findings: (i) Current VLMs exhibit limited font recognition capabilities, with many state-of-the-art models failing to achieve satisfactory performance. (ii) Few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting provide minimal benefits in improving font recognition accuracy across different VLMs. (iii) Attention analysis sheds light on the inherent limitations of VLMs in capturing semantic features.
What happens if we encounter a suitable font for our design work but do not know its name? Visual Font Recognition (VFR) systems are used to identify the font typeface in an image. These systems can assist graphic designers in identifying fonts used in images. A VFR system also aids in improving the speed and accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. In this paper, we introduce the first publicly available datasets in the field of Persian font recognition and employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to address this problem. The results show that the proposed pipeline obtained 78.0% top-1 accuracy on our new datasets, 89.1% on the IDPL-PFOD dataset, and 94.5% on the KAFD dataset. Furthermore, the average time spent in the entire pipeline for one sample of our proposed datasets is 0.54 and 0.017 seconds for CPU and GPU, respectively. We conclude that CNN methods can be used to recognize Persian fonts without the need for additional pre-processing steps such as feature extraction, binarization, normalization, etc.
In this paper, we investigate the usage of fine-grained font recognition on OCR for books printed from the 15th to the 18th century. We used a newly created dataset for OCR of early printed books for which fonts are labeled with bounding boxes. We know not only the font group used for each character, but the locations of font changes as well. In books of this period, we frequently find font group changes mid-line or even mid-word that indicate changes in language. We consider 8 different font groups present in our corpus and investigate 13 different subsets: the whole dataset and text lines with a single font, multiple fonts, Roman fonts, Gothic fonts, and each of the considered fonts, respectively. We show that OCR performance is strongly impacted by font style and that selecting fine-tuned models with font group recognition has a very positive impact on the results. Moreover, we developed a system using local font group recognition in order to combine the output of multiple font recognition models, and show that while slower, this approach performs better not only on text lines composed of multiple fonts but on the ones containing a single font only as well.