Similarity-based Text Recognition by Deeply Supervised Siamese Network

In this paper, we propose a new text recognition model based on measuring the visual similarity of text and predicting the content of the unlabeled texts. First a Siamese network is trained with deep supervision on a labeled training dataset. This network projects texts into a similarity manifold. The Deeply Supervised Siamese network learns visual similarity of texts. Then a K-nearest neighbor classifier is used to predict unlabeled text based on similarity distance to labeled texts. The performance of the model is evaluated on three datasets of machine-print and hand-written text combined. We demonstrate that the model reduces the cost of human estimation by 50%− 85%. The error of the system is less than 0.1%. The results also demonstrate that the predicted labels are sometimes better than human labels e.g. spelling correction.