Abstract
The importance of Scene Text Recognition (STR) in today’s increasingly digital world cannot be overstated. Given the significance of STR, data-intensive deep learning approaches that auto-learn feature mappings have primarily driven the development of STR solutions. Several benchmark datasets and substantial work on deep learning models are available for Latin languages to meet this need. On more complex, syntactically and semantically, Indian languages spoken and read by 1.3 billion people, there is less work and datasets available. This paper aims to address the Indian space’s lack of a comprehensive dataset by proposing the largest and most comprehensive real dataset - IndicSTR12 - and benchmarking STR performance on 12 major Indian languages (Assamese, Bengali, Odia, Marathi, Hindi, Kannada, Urdu, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, and Punjabi). A few works have addressed the same …