Curved scene text recognition is a challenging task in multimedia society due to large shape and texture variance. Previous methods address this challenge by extracting and rectifying text line with equidistantly sampling, which ignore character level information and lead to distorted characters. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Character-Aware Sampling and Rectification (CASR) module, which rectifies irregular text instance according to the location and orientation information of each individual character. Specifically, CASR regards each character as a basic unit and predicts the character-level attributes for sampling and rectification. Our module not only exploits detailed character information to obtain better rectification of text line, but also employs character-level supervision in training process. In addition, CASR provides a plug-and-play module which can be easily incorporated to existing text recognition pipeline. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our method obtains more accurate rectified text instances and achieves promising performance. We will release our code and models in the future.

Sampling is a basic operation of modern convolutional neural networks (CNN) since down-sampling operators are employed to enlarge the receptive field while up-sampling operators are adopted to increase resolution. Most existing deep segmentation networks employ regular grid sampling operators, which can be suboptimal for semantic segmentation task due to large shape and scale variance. To address this problem, this paper proposes a Context Guided Dynamic Sampling (CGDS) module to obtain an effective representation with rich shape and scale information by adaptively sampling useful segmentation information in spatial space. Moreover, we utilize the multi-scale contextual representations to guide the sampling process. Therefore, our CGDS can adaptively capture shape and scale information according to not only the input feature map but also the multi-scale semantic context. CGDS provides a plug-and-play module which can be easily incorporated in deep segmentation networks. We incorporate our proposed CGDS module into Dynamic Sampling Network (DSNet) and perform extensive experiments on segmentation datasets. Experimental results show that our CGDS significantly improves semantic segmentation performance and achieves state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 and ADE20K datasets. Our model achieves 85.2% mIOU on PASCAL VOC 2012 test set without MS COCO dataset pre-trained and 46.4% on ADE20K validation set. The codes will become publicly available after publication.