Building robust recognizers for Arabic has always been challenging. We demonstrate the effectiveness of an end-to-end trainable CNN-RNN hybrid architecture in recognizing Arabic text in videos and natural scenes. We outperform previous state-of-the-art on two publicly available video text datasets - ALIF and AcTiV. For the scene text recognition task, we introduce a new Arabic scene text dataset and establish baseline results. For scripts like Arabic, a major challenge in developing robust recognizers is the lack of large quantity of annotated data. We overcome this by synthesizing millions of Arabic text images from a large vocabulary of Arabic words and phrases. Our implementation is built on top of the CRNN model which is proven quite effective for English scene text recognition. The model follows a segmentation-free, sequence to sequence transcription approach. The network transcribes a sequence of convolutional features from the input image to a sequence of target labels. This does away with the need for segmenting input image into constituent characters/glyphs, which is often difficult for Arabic script. Further, the ability of RNNs to model contextual dependencies yields superior recognition results.

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@InProceedings{JainASAR17,
  author    = "Jain, M., Mathew, M. and Jawahar, C.~V.",
  title     = "Unconstrained Scene Text and Video Text Recognition for Arabic Script",
  booktitle = "1st International Workshop on Arabic Script Analysis and Recognition, Nancy, France",
  year      = "2017",
}