  We demonstrate that a generative model for object shapes can achieve state of
the art results on challenging scene text recognition tasks, and with orders of
magnitude fewer training images than required for competing discriminative
methods. In addition to transcribing text from challenging images, our method
performs fine-grained instance segmentation of characters. We show that our
model is more robust to both affine transformations and non-affine deformations
compared to previous approaches.
