Abstract: Recently, video text detection, tracking and recognition in natural scenes are becoming very popular in the computer vision community. However, most existing algorithms and benchmarks focus on common text cases (e.g., normal size, density) and single scenario, while ignore extreme video texts challenges, i.e., dense and small text in various scenarios. In this competition report, we establish a video text reading benchmark, named DSText, which focuses on dense and small text reading challenge in the video with various scenarios. Compared with the previous datasets, the proposed dataset mainly include three new challenges: 1) Dense video texts, new challenge for video text spotter. 2) High-proportioned small texts. 3) Various new scenarios, e.g., ‘Game’, ‘Sports’, etc. The proposed DSText includes 100 video clips from 12 open scenarios, supporting two tasks (i.e., video text tracking (Task 1) and end-to-end video text spotting (Task2)). During the competition period (opened on 15th February, 2023 and closed on 20th March, 2023), a total of 24 teams participated in the three proposed tasks with around 30 valid submissions, respectively. In this article, we describe detailed statistical information of the dataset, tasks, evaluation protocols and the results summaries of the ICDAR 2023 on DSText competition. Moreover, we hope the benchmark will promise the video text research in the community.

Abstract: In this report, we present the final results of the ICDAR 2023 Competition on RoadText Video Text Detection, Tracking and Recognition. The RoadText challenge is based on the RoadText-1K dataset and aims to assess and enhance current methods for scene text detection, recognition, and tracking in videos. The RoadText-1K dataset contains 1000 dash cam videos with annotations for text bounding boxes and transcriptions in every frame. The competition features an end-to-end task, requiring systems to accurately detect, track, and recognize text in dash cam videos. The paper presents a comprehensive review of the submitted methods along with a detailed analysis of the results obtained by the methods. The analysis provides valuable insights into the current capabilities and limitations of video text detection, tracking, and recognition systems for dashcam videos.

Abstract: Scene text detection and recognition is a crucial task in computer vision with numerous real-world applications. Transformer-based approaches are behind all current state-of-the-art models and have achieved excellent performance. However, the computational requirements of the transformer architecture makes training these methods slow and resource heavy. In this paper, we introduce a new token pruning strategy that significantly decreases training and inference times without sacrificing performance, striking a balance between accuracy and speed. We have applied this pruning technique to our own end-to-end transformer-based scene text understanding architecture. Our method uses a separate detection branch to guide the pruning of uninformative image features, which significantly reduces the number of tokens at the input of the transformer. Experimental results show how our network is able to obtain competitive results on multiple public benchmarks while running at significantly higher speeds.

Abstract: Despite decades of research in Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the recognition of old handwritten music scores remains a challenge because of the variabilities in the handwriting styles, paper degradation, lack of standard notation, etc. Therefore, the research in OMR systems adapted to the particularities of old manuscripts is crucial to accelerate the conversion of music scores existing in archives into digital libraries, fostering the dissemination and preservation of our music heritage. In this paper we explore the adaptation of sequence-to-sequence models with attention mechanism (used in translation and handwritten text recognition) and the generation of specific synthetic data for recognizing old music scores. The experimental validation demonstrates that our approach is promising, especially when compared with long short-term memory neural networks.

Abstract: Current visual question answering datasets do not consider the rich semantic information conveyed by text within an image. In this work, we present a new dataset, ST-VQA, that aims to highlight the importance of exploiting highlevel semantic information present in images as textual cues in the Visual Question Answering process. We use this dataset to define a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for which reading the scene text in the context provided by the visual information is necessary to reason and generate an appropriate answer. We propose a new evaluation metric for these tasks to account both for reasoning errors as well as shortcomings of the text recognition module. In addition we put forward a series of baseline methods, which provide further insight to the newly released dataset, and set the scene for further research.