  This paper presents a novel training method for end-to-end scene text
recognition. End-to-end scene text recognition offers high recognition
accuracy, especially when using the encoder-decoder model based on Transformer.
To train a highly accurate end-to-end model, we need to prepare a large
image-to-text paired dataset for the target language. However, it is difficult
to collect this data, especially for resource-poor languages. To overcome this
difficulty, our proposed method utilizes well-prepared large datasets in
resource-rich languages such as English, to train the resource-poor
encoder-decoder model. Our key idea is to build a model in which the encoder
reflects knowledge of multiple languages while the decoder specializes in
knowledge of just the resource-poor language. To this end, the proposed method
pre-trains the encoder by using a multilingual dataset that combines the
resource-poor language's dataset and the resource-rich language's dataset to
learn language-invariant knowledge for scene text recognition. The proposed
method also pre-trains the decoder by using the resource-poor language's
dataset to make the decoder better suited to the resource-poor language.
Experiments on Japanese scene text recognition using a small, publicly
available dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
