Platypus: A Generalized Specialist Model for Reading Text in Various Forms

Peng Wang, Li Zhaohai, Jun Tang, Humen Zhong, Fei Huang, 杨智博, Cong Yao

Platypus: A Generalized Specialist Model for Reading Text in Various Forms: 16 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #8 of 12 papers on 2024-08-28. Day-by-day upvote history.

Reading text from images (either natural scenes or documents) has been a long-standing research topic for decades, due to the high technical challenge and wide application range. Previously, individual specialist models are developed to tackle the sub-tasks of text reading (e.g., scene text recognition, handwritten text recognition and mathematical expression recognition). However, such specialist models usually cannot effectively generalize across different sub-tasks. Recently, generalist models (such as GPT-4V), trained on tremendous data in a unified way, have shown enormous potential in reading text in various scenarios, but with the drawbacks of limited accuracy and low efficiency. In this work, we propose Platypus, a generalized specialist model for text reading. Specifically, Platypus combines the best of both worlds: being able to recognize text of various forms with a single unified architecture, while achieving excellent accuracy and high efficiency. To better exploit the advantage of Platypus, we also construct a text reading dataset (called Worms), the images of which are curated from previous datasets and partially re-labeled. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed Platypus model. Model and data will be made publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/OCR/Platypus.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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