A Large Chinese Text Dataset in the Wild

In this paper, we introduce a very large Chinese text dataset in the wild. While optical character recognition (OCR) in document images is well studied and many commercial tools are available, the detection and recognition of text in natural images is still a challenging problem, especially for some more complicated character sets such as Chinese text. Lack of training data has always been a problem, especially for deep learning methods which require massive training data. In this paper, we provide details of a newly created dataset of Chinese text with about 1 million Chinese characters from 3850 unique ones annotated by experts in over 30000 street view images. This is a challenging dataset with good diversity containing planar text, raised text, text under poor illumination, distant text, partially occluded text, etc. Besides the dataset, we give baseline results using state-of-the-art methods for three tasks: character recognition (top-1 accuracy of 80.5%), character detection (AP of 70.9%), and text line detection (AED of 22.1). The dataset, source code, and trained models are publicly available.

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Tutorial

For latest tutorial, please checkout our git repository.

Files

• Paper
• Supplementary materials
• Dataset
• Baseline code
• Trained models

Evaluation Server

• The evaluation server is available on CodaLab Competitions. Submissions before 2022 can be found on the old CodaLab.
• You should submit a .zip file, which contains one .jsonl file in the top-level directory. Submission formats and evaluation metrics for classification task and detection task are described in tutorial part-2 and part-3, respectively.
• Sample submissions can be downloaded from "public submissions" of corresponding competition on CodaLab. You may need to login to CodaLab before downloading.
• Detailed results are provided in the "view detailed results" link for each submission.

Contact

@article{yuan2019ctw,
  author  = {Tai{-}Ling Yuan and Zhe Zhu and Kun Xu and Cheng{-}Jun Li and Tai{-}Jiang Mu and Shi{-}Min Hu},
  title   = {A Large Chinese Text Dataset in the Wild},
  journal = {Journal of Computer Science and Technology},
  volume  = {34},
  number  = {3},
  pages   = {509--521},
  year    = {2019},
}

Change Log

• 05/10/2023 (GMT+8): evaluation server migrated to the new CodaLab Competitions
• 06/17/2019 (GMT+8): replace the paper with A Large Chinese Text Dataset in the Wild
• 07/04/2018 (GMT+8): dataset moved to OneDrive
• 03/17/2018 (GMT+8): evaluation server available
• 03/15/2018 (GMT+8): dataset released on WeiYun and Google Drive
• 02/28/2018 (GMT+8): website comes online

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