GTC: Guided Training of CTC Towards Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Recognition

Understand

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention mechanism are two main approaches used in recent scene text recognition works.

• Compared with attention-based methods, CTC decoder has a much shorter inference time, yet a lower accuracy.
• To design an efficient and effective model, we propose the guided training of CTC (GTC), where CTC model learns a better alignment and feature representations from a more powerful attentional guidance.
• With the benefit of guided training, CTC model achieves robust and accurate prediction for both regular and irregular scene text while maintaining a fast inference speed.