Improving Deep Learning based Optical Character Recognition via Neural Architecture Search

Optical character rcecognition (OCR) is a process of converting images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded one. In recent years, the methods represented by deep learning have greatly improved the performance of OCR systems, but the main challenges of such systems are 1) to accurately perform text detection in complex scenes and 2) to identify and set the optimal parameters to optimize the performance of the system. In this paper, we propose an OCR method based on Neural Architecture Search technique, called AutOCR. The characteristic of the proposed method is the automatic design of text detection framework using an evolutionary computation neural architecture search method. This design can not only accurately recognize the text in a complex environment, but also avoid the process of experts participating in parameter adjustment. We compared it with different methods, and the experimental results proved the effectiveness of our method.