Text Spotting Python* Demo

This demo shows how to run Text Spotting models. Text Spotting models allow us to simultaneously detect and recognize text.

NOTE: Only batch size of 1 is supported.

How It Works

The demo application expects a text spotting model that is split into three parts. Every model part must be in the Intermediate Representation (IR) format.

First model is Mask-RCNN like text detector with the following constraints:

Second model is Text Recognition Encoder that takes text_features as input and produces encoded text.

Third model is Text Recognition Decoder that takes encoded text from Text Recognition Encoder ,previous symbol and hidden state. On the first step special Start Of Sequence (SOS) symbol and zero hidden state are fed to Text Recognition Decoder. The decoder produces symbols distribution, current hidden state each step until End Of Sequence (EOS) symbol is generated.

Examples of valid inputs to specify with a command-line argument -i are a path to a video file or a numeric ID of a web camera.

The demo workflow is the following:

  1. The demo application reads frames from the provided input, resizes them to fit into the input image blob of the network (im_data).
  2. The im_info input blob passes resulting resolution and scale of a pre-processed image to the network to perform inference of Mask-RCNN-like text detector.
  3. The Text Recognition Encoder takes input from the text detector and produces output.
  4. The Text Recognition Decoder takes output from the Text Recognition Encoder output as input and produces output.
  5. The demo visualizes the resulting text spotting results. Certain command-line options affect the visualization:
    • If you specify --show_boxes and --show_scores arguments, bounding boxes and confidence scores are also shown.
    • By default, tracking is used to show text instance with the same color throughout the whole video. It assumes more or less static scene with instances in two frames being a part of the same track if intersection over union of the masks is greater than the 0.5 threshold. To disable tracking, specify the --no_track argument.

NOTE: By default, Open Model Zoo demos expect input with BGR channels order. If you trained your model to work with RGB order, you need to manually rearrange the default channels order in the demo application or reconvert your model using the Model Optimizer tool with --reverse_input_channels argument specified. For more information about the argument, refer to When to Reverse Input Channels section of Converting a Model Using General Conversion Parameters.

Running

Run the application with the -h option to see the following usage message:

usage: text_spotting_demo.py [-h] -m_m "<path>" -m_te "<path>" -m_td "<path>"
-i "<path>" [-d "<device>"]
[-l "<absolute_path>"] [--delay "<num>"]
[-pt "<num>"] [-a ALPHABET]
[--trd_input_prev_symbol TRD_INPUT_PREV_SYMBOL]
[--trd_input_prev_hidden TRD_INPUT_PREV_HIDDEN]
[--trd_input_encoder_outputs TRD_INPUT_ENCODER_OUTPUTS]
[--trd_output_symbols_distr TRD_OUTPUT_SYMBOLS_DISTR]
[--trd_output_cur_hidden TRD_OUTPUT_CUR_HIDDEN]
[--keep_aspect_ratio] [--no_track]
[--show_scores] [--show_boxes] [-pc] [-r]
[--no_show] [-u UTILIZATION_MONITORS]
Options:
-h, --help Show this help message and exit.
-m_m "<path>", --mask_rcnn_model "<path>"
Required. Path to an .xml file with a trained Mask-
RCNN model with additional text features output.
-m_te "<path>", --text_enc_model "<path>"
Required. Path to an .xml file with a trained text
recognition model (encoder part).
-m_td "<path>", --text_dec_model "<path>"
Required. Path to an .xml file with a trained text
recognition model (decoder part).
-i "<path>" Required. Input to process.
-d "<device>", --device "<device>"
Optional. Specify the target device to infer on, i.e. CPU, GPU.
The demo will look for a suitable plugin for device specified
(by default, it is CPU). Please refer to OpenVINO documentation
for the list of devices supported by the model.
-l "<absolute_path>", --cpu_extension "<absolute_path>"
Required for CPU custom layers. Absolute path to a
shared library with the kernels implementation.
--delay "<num>" Optional. Interval in milliseconds of waiting for a
key to be pressed.
-pt "<num>", --prob_threshold "<num>"
Optional. Probability threshold for detections
filtering.
-a ALPHABET, --alphabet ALPHABET
Optional. Alphabet that is used for decoding.
--trd_input_prev_symbol TRD_INPUT_PREV_SYMBOL
Optional. Name of previous symbol input node to text
recognition head decoder part.
--trd_input_prev_hidden TRD_INPUT_PREV_HIDDEN
Optional. Name of previous hidden input node to text
recognition head decoder part.
--trd_input_encoder_outputs TRD_INPUT_ENCODER_OUTPUTS
Optional. Name of encoder outputs input node to text
recognition head decoder part.
--trd_output_symbols_distr TRD_OUTPUT_SYMBOLS_DISTR
Optional. Name of symbols distribution output node
from text recognition head decoder part.
--trd_output_cur_hidden TRD_OUTPUT_CUR_HIDDEN
Optional. Name of current hidden output node from text
recognition head decoder part.
--keep_aspect_ratio Optional. Force image resize to keep aspect ratio.
--no_track Optional. Disable tracking.
--show_scores Optional. Show detection scores.
--show_boxes Optional. Show bounding boxes.
-pc, --perf_counts Optional. Report performance counters.
-r, --raw_output_message
Optional. Output inference results raw values.
--no_show Optional. Don't show output
-u UTILIZATION_MONITORS, --utilization_monitors UTILIZATION_MONITORS
Optional. List of monitors to show initially.

Running the application with an empty list of options yields the short version of the usage message and an error message.

To run the demo, you can use public or pre-trained models. To download the pre-trained models, use the OpenVINO Model Downloader or go to https://download.01.org/opencv/.

NOTE: Before running the demo with a trained model, make sure the model is converted to the Inference Engine format (*.xml + *.bin) using the Model Optimizer tool.

To run the demo, please provide paths to the model in the IR format and to an input with images:

python3 text_spotting_demo.py \
-m_m <path_to_models>/text-spotting-0002-detector.xml \
-m_te <path_to_models>/text-spotting-0002-recognizer-encoder.xml \
-m_td <path_to_models>/text-spotting-0002-recognizer-decoder.xml \
-i 0

Demo Output

The application uses OpenCV to display resulting text instances and current inference performance.

See Also