DeepLetters

A tensorflow implementaion for text detection and text recognition.

DeepLetters consists of two networks.

• SSD(Single Shot MultiBox Detector) is used to detect text regions in images.
• Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network recognizes the textual content of the identified text regions.

Results

Training text detector

First you need to clone the tensorflow/models repository and download the pre-trained SSD model.

$ git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/models.git
$ cd models/research/object_detection
$ wget http://download.tensorflow.org/models/object_detection/ssd_inception_v2_coco_2018_01_28.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf ssd_inception_v2_coco_2018_01_28.tar.gz

After cloning the repository, you should append the tensorflow/models/research/ and slim directories to PYTHONPATH.

# From tensorflow/models/research/
$ export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:`pwd`:`pwd`/slim

Then clone the DeepLetters repository and create symbolic link to tensorflow/models directory.

$ git clone https://github.com/satojkovic/DeepLetters
$ cd DeepLetters
$ ln -s <OBJECT_DETECTION_API_DIR>/ssd_inception_v2_coco_2018_01_28 ssd_inception_v2_coco_2018_01_28

Before training text detector, you need to convert cocotext.v2.json and synthtext gt.mat into tfrecord format.

# COCO dataset
# Train
$ python gen_coco_tfrecord.py --train_or_val train --cocotext_json <DATA_ROOT_DIR_PATH>/cocotext/cocotext.v2.json --coco_imgdir <DATA_ROOT_DIR_PATH>/COCO/images --output_path coco_train.tfrecord
# Validation
$ python gen_coco_tfrecord.py --train_or_val val --cocotext_json <DATA_ROOT_DIR_PATH>/cocotext/cocotext.v2.json --coco_imgdir <DATA_ROOT_DIR_PATH>/COCO/images --output_path coco_val.tfrecord

# SynthText
# Train and Test
$ python gen_synthtext_tfrecord.py --gt_mat_path <DATA_ROOT_DIR_PATH>/SynthText/gt.mat

<DATA_ROOT_DIR_PATH> is the path to root directory of COCO and SynthText datasets.

Now, to start a new training job, type the following command.

$ python <OBJECT_DETECTION_API_DIR>/legacy/train.py --logtostderr --pipeline_config_path=ssd_inception_v2.config --train_dir=training

How to use

$ python deep_letters.py --input <input image or video> --detection_model_path <detection_model_pb> --detection_th <th> --recognition_model_path <recognition_model.pth>

Download detection model file (pb file) from GoogleDrive.

Clone crnn.pytorch repository and place it on same level with DeepLetters repository. (DeepLetters use crnn.pytorch to recognize texts in detection results)