AB-LSTM: Attention-Based Bidirectional LSTM Model for Scene Text Detection

By Zhandong Liu, Wengang Zhou and Houqiang Li.

1. Introduction

This project contains the following source files: model training and testing, text center block label and word stroke region label generation, label augmentation, and sample models that have been trained.

2. Installation

• Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/lzd0825/AB-LSTM.git
cd ./AB-LSTM

• Requirements for Caffe and pycaffe (see: Caffe installation instructions)

  Note: Caffe must be built with support for Python layers!

  # In your Makefile.config, make sure to have this line uncommented
  WITH_PYTHON_LAYER := 1
  # Unrelatedly, it's also recommended that you use CUDNN
  USE_CUDNN := 1

• Then you can do as follow:

cd ./AB-LSTM/Train_Test_ABLSTM/caffe/}  
make –j  
make pycaffe 

3. Testing

3.1 Generate WSR/TCB score map

• Download the TD_Total_Text_WSR_iter_175000.caffemodel, trained on Total-text training dataset.
• Download the TD_ICDAR2013_TCB_iter_50000.caffemodel, finute trained on ICDAR2013 training dataset.
• Then you can do as follow:

cd ../snapshot  

• Put both trained caffemodels to the fold of ${/AB-LSTM/Train_Test_ABLSTM/snapshot}.

• Suppose you have downloaded the test datasets (e.g. ICDAR2013, MSRA-TD500, etc.), execute the following commands to test the model on the test datasets. Then you can do as follow:

cd ../Demo  
python Demo_forword_TCB.py  
python Demo_forword_WSR.py  

3.2 There are some samples:

3.3 Threshold WSR/TCB maps:

You can do as follow:

cd ${AB-LSTM/Demo_Text_detection}  
python fuse_thred.py  

3.4 Generate detection results

You can do as follow:

python Demo_region_word.py

3.5 There are some samples:

4. Training

Download the pretrained model vgg16convs.caffemodel, and put it to ${AB-LSTM/Train_Test_ABLSTM/model/}

4.1 Generate your TCB label and WSR label

Scripts for generating ground truth have been provided in the ${AB-LSTM/Label_generate}. You can use our code to generate you own training labels on different public datasets (e.g. ICDAR2013, MSRA-TD500, CTW1500, and Total-text, etc.).

4.2 Data Augmentation

We use “ImageDataGenerator” in “keras.preproces-sing.image” to achieve data augmentation. cd ${AB-LSTM/Data_aug}

You must modify the parameters image_save_prefix and mask_save_prefix in the trainGenerator function. Note that you must use an absolute path, such as: image_save_prefix = "/data1/XXX/aug_dataset/Aug_example/train_aug/aug",mask_save_prefix = "/data1/XXX/aug_dataset/Aug_example /train_gt_aug/aug".

There are some samples on data augmentation:

4.3 Train your own model

Modify ${AB-LSTM/Train_Test_ABLSTM/TD_ICDAR2013_TCB.py, and TD_Total_Text_WSR.py} to configure your dataset name and dataset path like:
......
data_params['root'] = "./AB-LSTM/Train_Test_ABLSTM/datasets/Total_Text_WSR/"

data_params['source'] = "Total_Text_WSR.lst"
......

4.4 Start training

You can do as follow:

cd ${AB-LSTM/Train_Test_ABLSTM/}  
sh ./train_ICDAR2013_TCB.sh
sh ./train_Total_Text_WSR.sh

Citation

Use this bibtex to cite this repository:

@misc{liu_AB-LSTM_2018,
  title={AB-LSTM: Attention-Based Bidirectional LSTM Model for Scene Text Detection},
  author={Zhandong Liu, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li},
  year={2018},
  publisher={Github},
  journal={GitHub repository},
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/lzd0825/AB-LSTM/}},
}

Acknowlegement