Papers › SAFL: A Self-Attention Scene Text Recognizer with Focal Loss
SAFL: A Self-Attention Scene Text Recognizer with Focal Loss
Bao Hieu Tran, Thanh Le-Cong, Huu Manh Nguyen, Duc Anh Le, Thanh Hung Nguyen, Phi Le Nguyen
In the last decades, scene text recognition has gained worldwide attention from both the academic community and actual users due to its importance in a wide range of applications. Despite achievements in optical character recognition, scene text recognition remains challenging due to inherent problems such as distortions or irregular layout. Most of the existing approaches mainly leverage recurrence or convolution-based neural networks. However, while recurrent neural networks (RNNs) usually suffer from slow training speed due to sequential computation and encounter problems as vanishing gradient or bottleneck, CNN endures a trade-off between complexity and performance. In this paper, we introduce SAFL, a self-attention-based neural network model with the focal loss for scene text recognition, to overcome the limitation of the existing approaches. The use of focal loss instead of negative log-likelihood helps the model focus more on low-frequency samples training. Moreover, to deal with the distortions and irregular texts, we exploit Spatial TransformerNetwork (STN) to rectify text before passing to the recognition network. We perform experiments to compare the performance of the proposed model with seven benchmarks. The numerical results show that our model achieves the best performance.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scene Text Recognition | ICDAR 2003 | SAFL | Accuracy | 95.0 | #5 of 12 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Scene Text Recognition | ICDAR2013 | SAFL | Accuracy | 92.8 | #29 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Scene Text Recognition | ICDAR2015 | SAFL | Accuracy | 77.5 | #21 of 27 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Scene Text Recognition | SVT | SAFL | Accuracy | 88.6 | #29 of 37 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections