  Recognizing irregular text in natural scene images is challenging due to the
large variance in text appearance, such as curvature, orientation and
distortion. Most existing approaches rely heavily on sophisticated model
designs and/or extra fine-grained annotations, which, to some extent, increase
the difficulty in algorithm implementation and data collection. In this work,
we propose an easy-to-implement strong baseline for irregular scene text
recognition, using off-the-shelf neural network components and only word-level
annotations. It is composed of a $31$-layer ResNet, an LSTM-based
encoder-decoder framework and a 2-dimensional attention module. Despite its
simplicity, the proposed method is robust and achieves state-of-the-art
performance on both regular and irregular scene text recognition benchmarks.
Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/ShowAttendRead
