This paper introduces MixTex, an end-to-end LaTeX OCR model designed for low-bias multilingual recognition, along with its novel data collection method. In applying Transformer architectures to LaTeX text recognition, we identified specific bias issues, such as the frequent misinterpretation of $e-t$ as $e^{-t}$. We attribute this bias to the characteristics of the arXiv dataset commonly used for training. To mitigate this bias, we propose an innovative data augmentation method. This approach introduces controlled noise into the recognition targets by blending genuine text with pseudo-text and incorporating a small proportion of disruptive characters. We further suggest that this method has broader applicability to various disambiguation recognition tasks, including the accurate identification of erroneous notes in musical performances. MixTex's architecture leverages the Swin Transformer as its encoder and RoBERTa as its decoder. Our experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly reduces bias in recognition tasks. Notably, when processing clear and unambiguous images, the model adheres strictly to the image rather than over-relying on contextual cues for token prediction.
Optical Character Recognition is a technique that converts document images into searchable and editable text, making it a valuable tool for processing scanned documents. While the Farsi language stands as a prominent and official language in Asia, efforts to develop efficient methods for recognizing Farsi printed text have been relatively limited. This is primarily attributed to the languages distinctive features, such as cursive form, the resemblance between certain alphabet characters, and the presence of numerous diacritics and dot placement. On the other hand, given the substantial training sample requirements of deep-based architectures for effective performance, the development of such datasets holds paramount significance. In light of these concerns, this paper aims to present a novel large-scale dataset, IDPL-PFOD2, tailored for Farsi printed text recognition. The dataset comprises 2003541 images featuring a wide variety of fonts, styles, and sizes. This dataset is an extension of the previously introduced IDPL-PFOD dataset, offering a substantial increase in both volume and diversity. Furthermore, the datasets effectiveness is assessed through the utilization of both CRNN-based and Vision Transformer architectures. The CRNN-based model achieves a baseline accuracy rate of 78.49% and a normalized edit distance of 97.72%, while the Vision Transformer architecture attains an accuracy of 81.32% and a normalized edit distance of 98.74%.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the challenges of printed Urdu text recognition using high-resolution, multi-scale semantic feature extraction. Our proposed UTRNet architecture, a hybrid CNN-RNN model, demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. To address the limitations of previous works, which struggle to generalize to the intricacies of the Urdu script and the lack of sufficient annotated real-world data, we have introduced the UTRSet-Real, a large-scale annotated real-world dataset comprising over 11,000 lines and UTRSet-Synth, a synthetic dataset with 20,000 lines closely resembling real-world and made corrections to the ground truth of the existing IIITH dataset, making it a more reliable resource for future research. We also provide UrduDoc, a benchmark dataset for Urdu text line detection in scanned documents. Additionally, we have developed an online tool for end-to-end Urdu OCR from printed documents by integrating UTRNet with a text detection model. Our work not only addresses the current limitations of Urdu OCR but also paves the way for future research in this area and facilitates the continued advancement of Urdu OCR technology. The project page with source code, datasets, annotations, trained models, and online tool is available at abdur75648.github.io/UTRNet.
Printed text recognition is an important problem for industrial OCR systems. Printed text is constructed in a standard procedural fashion in most settings. We develop a mathematical model for this process that can be applied to the backward inference problem of text recognition from an image. Through ablation experiments we show that this model is realistic and that a multi-task objective setting can help to stabilize estimation of its free parameters, enabling use of conventional deep learning methods. Furthermore, by directly modeling the geometric perturbations of text synthesis we show that our model can help recover missing characters from incomplete text regions, the bane of multicomponent OCR systems, enabling recognition even when the detection returns incomplete information.