TextNet for Text-Related Image Quality Assessment

摘要

With the rapid increase of consumer photos, annotating and retrieving such images with text are becoming more significant, which requires optical character recognition (OCR) techniques. However, to predict OCR accuracy, text-related image quality assessment (TIQA) is necessary and of great value, especially in online business processes. With more interests in text, TIQA aims to compute the quality score of an image through predicting the degree of degradation at textual regions. To assess text-related quality on detected textlines, this paper proposes a deep neural network, TextNet, which mainly includes three layers: encoder, decoder, and prediction. The decoder layer combines the encoded feature map with the decoded map through deconvolution and concatenation. The prediction layer is designed for textline detection and quality assessment with a new loss function. Under the TIQA framework, the overall text-related image quality is computed through pooling the quality of all detected textlines by way of weighted averaging. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can work well in jointly assessing text related image quality and detecting textlines, even for unknown scene images.