TrOCR: Transformer-Based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models
Minghao Li, Tengchao Lv, Jingye Chen, Lei Cui, Yijuan Lu, Dinei Florencio, Cha Zhang, Zhoujun Li
Abstract
Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization. Existing approaches are usually built based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for char-level text generation. In addition, another language model is usually needed to improve the overall accuracy as a post-processing step. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end text recognition approach with pre-trained image Transformer and text Transformer models, namely TrOCR, which leverages the Transformer architecture for both image understanding and wordpiece-level text generation. The TrOCR model is simple but effective, and can be pre-trained with large-scale synthetic data and fine-tuned with human-labeled datasets. Experiments show that the TrOCR model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the printed, handwritten and scene text recognition tasks. The TrOCR models and code are publicly available at https://aka.ms/trocr.
BibTeX
@article{Li_Lv_Chen_Cui_Lu_Florencio_Zhang_Li_Wei_2023, title={TrOCR: Transformer-Based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models}, volume={37}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/26538}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v37i11.26538}, abstractNote={Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization. Existing approaches are usually built based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for char-level text generation. In addition, another language model is usually needed to improve the overall accuracy as a post-processing step. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end text recognition approach with pre-trained image Transformer and text Transformer models, namely TrOCR, which leverages the Transformer architecture for both image understanding and wordpiece-level text generation. The TrOCR model is simple but effective, and can be pre-trained with large-scale synthetic data and fine-tuned with human-labeled datasets. Experiments show that the TrOCR model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the printed, handwritten and scene text recognition tasks. The TrOCR models and code are publicly available at https://aka.ms/trocr.}, number={11}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Li, Minghao and Lv, Tengchao and Chen, Jingye and Cui, Lei and Lu, Yijuan and Florencio, Dinei and Zhang, Cha and Li, Zhoujun and Wei, Furu}, year={2023}, month={Jun.}, pages={13094-13102} }