Spatial attention contrastive network for scene text recognition

At present, most scene text recognition methods achieve good performance by training models on many synthetic data. However, many data lead to huge storage space and large amount of calculation. And there is a gap between synthetic and real data. To solve these problems, we use a few real data to train a novel proposed model named spatial attention contrastive network (SAC-Net). The SAC-Net consists of a background suppression network (BSNet), a feature encoder, an attention decoder (ADEer), and a feature contrastive network (FCNet). The BSNet based on U-Net is used to reduce the interference of background. For relatively low prediction accuracy brought by connectionist temporal classification, we design an ADEer to improve performance by using convolutional attention mechanism. Based on data augmentation, we design a FCNet which belongs to contrastive learning. Finally, our SAC-Net is almost equivalent to the state-of-the-art model trained on a few real data for word accuracy on six benchmark test datasets.