Note: This is a virtual presentation. Here is the link for where the presentation will be taking place.
Title: Student-Teacher Learning Techniques for Bilingual and Low Resource OCR
Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the automatic generation of a transcription given a line image of text. Current methods have been very successful on printed English text, with Character Error Rates of less than 1¥%. However, clean datasets are not commonly seen in real life applications. There is a move in OCR towards `text in the wild’, conditions where there are lower resolution images like store fronts, street sign, and billboards. Oftentimes these texts contain multiple scripts, especially in countries where multiple languges are spoken. In addition, Latin characters are wildly seen no matter what language. The presence of multilingual text poses a unique challenge.
Traditional OCR methods involve text localization, script identification, and then text recognition. A separate system is used in each task and the results from one system are passed to the next. However, the downside of this pipeline approach is that errors propagate downstream and there is no way of providing feedback upstream. These downsides can be mitigated with fully integrated approaches, where one large system does text localization, script identification, and text recognition jointly. These approaches are also sometimes known as end-to-end approaches in literature.
With larger and larger networks, there is also a need for a greater amount of training data. However, this data may be difficult to obtain if the target language is low resource. There are also problems if the data that is obtained is in a slightly different domain, for example, printed versus handwritten text. This is where synthetic data generation techniques and domain adaptation techniques can be helpful.
Given these current challenges in OCR, this thesis proposal is focused on training an integrated (ie: end-to-end) bilingual systems and domain adaptation techniques. Both these objectives can be achieved using student-teacher learning methods. The basics of this approach is to have a trained teacher model add an additional loss function while training a student model. The outputs of the teacher will be used as soft targets for the student to learn. The following experiments will be performed:
Create monolingual baselines
Create bilingual baselines that do not require script identification.
Use Student-Teacher techniques to train bilingual models via teacher models specialized on different languages.
Use Student-Teacher techniques to train monolingual baselines with teacher models trained on out-of-domain data.
Committee Members
Sanjeev Khudanpur, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Najim Dehak, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Jesús Villalba, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering