dikubab/Amharic_OCR

Amharic OCR based on MMOCR

Detection and Recognition of Amharic Scene Text using the toolbox

This toolbox is an open-source toolbox based and for details of installation and related information see (https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmocr.

Generally, Geʽez/Abugida/Ethiopic script has up to 519 characters. For Amharic, we use 289-319 characters depending on whether we use Ethiopic numerals and punctuation.

Amharic Text Detection dataset preprocessing

We have two datasets for the detection task. HUST-ART is the real word dataset, and HUST-AST is the synthetic dataset. HUST-ART consists of 1500 training images and 700 test images. HUST-AST comprises 75,904 training images. To convert the dataset labels to MMOCR format, use tools/data/textdet/icdar_converter.py as follows

python tools/data/textdet/icdar_converter.py det_datasets/HUST-ART -o det_datasets/HUST-ART -d icdar2015 --split-list training test

Amharic Text Recognition

We have two training sets and two test sets datasets. Tana (TN) and Waliya (WL) training sets consist of 2.85 and 6M cropped words, respectively. HUST-ART and ABE test sets consist of 4039 and 5218 text images. We also have a validation dataset composed of 14835 text images, which is the training part of HUST-ART and ABE. All five datasets are in LMDB format.

The toolbox usage

1. In the directory configs/base/recog_pipelines/, you have different pipelines you must change dict(type='LoadImageFromFile') to dict(type='LoadImageFromLMDB'),
2. In the directory configs/base/recog_datasets/, you need to modify the path of test and train datasets.
3. In the directory mmocr/models/textrecog/convertors/ base.py define the dictionary using the 314 Amharic characters. No need to worry we have modified it. Based on your character set, modify dict_type in all other related files. We have modified the configs/textrecog/satrn/satrn_small.py settings. You can use it as an example.
   The datasets for both detection and recognition can be downloaded from the website https://github.com/dikubab/HUST-ASTD/blob/main/index.md.

The Waliya-related LMDB dataset link will be provided very soon.

1. Test and Validation sets LMDB https://mega.nz/folder/Ub0SnBBa#Fh6pFqbvXVxsa7OJPfJEwA
2. Tana(TN) LMDB https://mega.nz/folder/NGcC1DaQ#soagog8p_LgOnm6Gx9wdCQ

Citation

If you find our datasets useful in your research, please consider cite:

@article{dikubab2022comprehensive,
  title={Comprehensive benchmark datasets for Amharic scene text detection and recognition},
  author={Dikubab, Wondimu and Liang, Dingkang and Liao, Minghui and Bai, Xiang},
  journal={Science China Information Sciences, Vol. 65, Special Focus on Deep Learning for Computer Vision, Article number: 160106},
  year={2022}
}

License

This project is released under the Apache 2.0 license.