Abstract: We present a method for exploiting weakly annotated images to improve text extraction pipelines. The approach uses an arbitrary end-to-end text recognition system to obtain text region proposals and their, possibly erroneous, transcriptions. The method includes matching of imprecise transcriptions to weak annotations and an edit distance guided neighbourhood search. It produces nearly error-free, localised instances of scene text, which we treat as “pseudo ground truth” (PGT). The method is applied to two weakly-annotated datasets. Training with the extracted PGT consistently improves the accuracy of a state of the art recognition model, by 3.7% on average, across different benchmark datasets (image domains) and 24.5% on one of the weakly annotated datasets 1 1 Acknowledgements. The authors were supported by Czech Technical University student grant SGS20/171/0HK3/3TJ13, the MEYS VVV project CZ.02.1.01/0.010.0J16 019/0000765 Research Center for Informatics, the Spanish Research project TIN2017-89779-P and the CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya.