Guided Attention for Large Scale Scene Text Verification

Dafang He
Alex Gorban
Derrall Heath
Julian Ibarz
Qian Yu
Daniel Kifer
C. Lee Giles
arXiv (2018)

Abstract

Many tasks are related to determining if a particular text string exists in an image. In this work, we propose a model called Guided Attention that learns this task end-to-end. The model takes an image and a text string as input and then outputs the probability of the text string being present in the image. This is the first end-to-end model that learns such relationships between text and images and that does not require explicit scene text detection or recognition. Such a model can be applied to a variety of tasks requiring to know whether a named entity is present in an image. Furthermore, this model does not need any bounding box annotation, and it is the first work in scene text area that tackles such a problem. We show that our method is better than several state-of-the-art methods on a challenging Street View Business Matching dataset, which contains millions of images. In addition, we demonstrate the uniqueness of our task via a comparison between our problem and a typical VQA (Visual Question Answering) problem, which also has as input an image and a sequence of words. This new real-world task provides a new perspective for various research combining images and text.