Papers › Recurrence-free unconstrained handwritten text recognition using gated fully...

Recurrence-free unconstrained handwritten text recognition using gated fully convolutional network

9 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.04961archive 2025-07-28

Denis Coquenet, Clément Chatelain, Thierry Paquet

Unconstrained handwritten text recognition is a major step in most document analysis tasks. This is generally processed by deep recurrent neural networks and more specifically with the use of Long Short-Term Memory cells. The main drawbacks of these components are the large number of parameters involved and their sequential execution during training and prediction. One alternative solution to using LSTM cells is to compensate the long time memory loss with an heavy use of convolutional layers whose operations can be executed in parallel and which imply fewer parameters. In this paper we present a Gated Fully Convolutional Network architecture that is a recurrence-free alternative to the well-known CNN+LSTM architectures. Our model is trained with the CTC loss and shows competitive results on both the RIMES and IAM datasets. We release all code to enable reproduction of our experiments: https://github.com/FactoDeepLearning/LinePytorchOCR.

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Code

FactoDeepLearning/LinePytorchOCR officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

Handwritten Text Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Handwritten Text Recognition IAM(line-level) GFCN Test CER 8.0 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Handwritten Text Recognition IAM(line-level) GFCN Test WER 28.6 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Handwritten Text Recognition LAM(line-level) GFCN Test CER 5.2 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Handwritten Text Recognition LAM(line-level) GFCN Test WER 18.5 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

CTC LossLSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

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