PaddleOCR/StyleText

Quick Start

Style-Text is an improvement of the SRNet network proposed in Baidu's self-developed text editing algorithm "Editing Text in the Wild". It is different from the commonly used GAN methods. This tool decomposes the text synthesis task into three sub-modules to improve the effect of synthetic data: text style transfer module, background extraction module and fusion module.

The following figure shows some example results. In addition, the actual nameplate text recognition scene and the Korean text recognition scene verify the effectiveness of the synthesis tool, as follows.

Preparation

1. Please refer the QUICK INSTALLATION to install PaddlePaddle. Python3 environment is strongly recommended.
2. Download the pretrained models and unzip:

cd tools/style_text_rec
wget /path/to/style_text_models.zip
unzip style_text_models.zip

You can dowload models here. If you save the model files in other folders, please edit the three model paths in configs/config.yml:

bg_generator:
  pretrain: style_text_rec/bg_generator
...
text_generator:
  pretrain: style_text_models/text_generator
...
fusion_generator:
  pretrain: style_text_models/fusion_generator

Demo

1. You can use the following commands to run a demo：

python -m tools.synth_image -c configs/config.yml

2. The results are fake_bg.jpg, fake_text.jpg and fake_fusion.jpg as shown in the figure above. Above them:

   • fake_text.jpg is the generated image with the same font style as Style Input;
   • fake_bg.jpg is the generated image of Style Input after removing foreground.
   • fake_fusion.jpg is the final result, that is synthesised by fake_text.jpg and fake_bg.jpg.

3. If want to generate image by other Style Input or Text Input, you can modify the tools/synth_image.py:

   • img = cv2.imread("examples/style_images/1.jpg"): the path of Style Input;
   • corpus = "PaddleOCR": the Text Input;
   • Notice：modify the language option(language = "en") to adapt Text Input, that support en, ch, ko.

4. We also provide batch_synth_images mothod, that can combine corpus and pictures in pairs to generate a batch of data.

Advanced Usage

Components

Style Text Rec mainly contains the following components：

• style_samplers: It can sample Style Input from a dataset. Now, We only provide DatasetSampler.

• corpus_generators: It can generate corpus. Now, wo only provide two corpus_generators:

  • EnNumCorpus: It can generate a random string according to a given length, including uppercase and lowercase English letters, numbers and spaces.
  • FileCorpus: It can read a text file and randomly return the words in it.

• text_drawers: It can generate Text Input(text picture in standard font according to the input corpus). Note that when using, you have to modify the language information according to the corpus.

• predictors: It can call the deep learning model to generate new data based on the Style Input and Text Input.

• writers: It can write the generated pictures(fake_bg.jpg, fake_text.jpg and fake_fusion.jpg) and label information to the disk.

• synthesisers: It can call the all modules to complete the work.

Generate Dataset

Before the start, you need to prepare some data as material. First, you should have the style reference data for synthesis tasks, which are generally used as datasets for OCR recognition tasks.

1. The referenced dataset can be specifed in configs/dataset_config.yml:

   • StyleSampler:

     • method: The method of StyleSampler.
     • image_home: The directory of pictures.
     • label_file: The list of pictures path if with_label is false, otherwise, the label file path.
     • with_label: The label_file is label file or not.

   • CorpusGenerator:

     • method: The mothod of CorpusGenerator. If FileCorpus used, you need modify corpus_file and language accordingly, if EnNumCorpus, other configurations is not needed.
     • language: The language of the corpus. Needed if method is not EnNumCorpus.
     • corpus_file: The corpus file path. Needed if method is not EnNumCorpus.

2. You can run the following command to start synthesis task:

   python -m tools.synth_dataset.py -c configs/dataset_config.yml
   

3. You can using the following command to start multiple synthesis tasks in a multi-threaded manner, which needed to specifying tags by -t:

   python -m tools.synth_dataset.py -t 0 -c configs/dataset_config.yml
   python -m tools.synth_dataset.py -t 1 -c configs/dataset_config.yml
   

OCR Recognition Training

After completing the above operations, you can get the synthetic data set for OCR recognition. Next, please complete the training by refering to [OCR Recognition Document](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/dygraph/doc/doc_ch/recognition. md#%E5%90%AF%E5%8A%A8%E8%AE%AD%E7%BB%83).