Transferring General Multimodal Pretrained Models to Text Recognition
Junyang Lin, Xuancheng Ren, Yichang Zhang, Gao Liu, Peng Wang, Yang An, Chang Zhou · 2023
This paper proposes a new method, OFA-OCR, to transfer multimodal pretrained models to text recognition.Specifically, we recast text recognition as image captioning and directly transfer a unified vision-language pretrained model to the end task.Without pretraining on large-scale annotated or synthetic text recognition data, OFA-OCR outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Chinese text recognition benchmark.Additionally, we construct an OCR pipeline with OFA-OCR, and we demonstrate that it can achieve competitive performance with the product-level API.The code 1 and demo 2 are publicly available.