CharFormer: A Glyph Fusion based Attentive Framework for High-precision Character Image Denoising

TL;DR

CharFormer is a novel glyph fusion and attention-based framework designed to improve character image denoising by preserving glyph integrity and enhancing recognition accuracy, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a glyph fusion and attention mechanism framework with a parallel target task to maintain glyph consistency during denoising, a novel approach in character image restoration.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art denoising methods quantitatively

Preserves character glyphs effectively during denoising

Enhances character recognition performance after denoising

Abstract

Degraded images commonly exist in the general sources of character images, leading to unsatisfactory character recognition results. Existing methods have dedicated efforts to restoring degraded character images. However, the denoising results obtained by these methods do not appear to improve character recognition performance. This is mainly because current methods only focus on pixel-level information and ignore critical features of a character, such as its glyph, resulting in character-glyph damage during the denoising process. In this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework based on glyph fusion and attention mechanisms, i.e., CharFormer, for precisely recovering character images without changing their inherent glyphs. Unlike existing frameworks, CharFormer introduces a parallel target task for capturing additional information and injecting it into the image denoising backbone, which will maintain the consistency of character glyphs during character image denoising. Moreover, we utilize attention-based networks for global-local feature interaction, which will help to deal with blind denoising and enhance denoising performance. We compare CharFormer with state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of CharFormer quantitatively and qualitatively.