The University of Tokyo · Computer Science
Professor Jeonghun Baek's research lab specializes in scene text recognition (STR), with a strong focus on advancing robust and generalizable models for challenging text recognition scenarios. The lab explores unified frameworks for fair evaluation of STR models, investigates few-shot and real-data training strategies to reduce reliance on synthetic data, and pioneers novel tasks such as recognizing irregular and truncated texts—especially in artistic or multilingual contexts. The lab also investigates cross-lingual learning to improve performance in low-resource languages, particularly for non-English and complex scripts.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Many new proposals for scene text recognition (STR) models have been introduced in recent years. While each claim to have pushed the boundary of the technology, a holistic and fair comparison has been largely missing in the field due to the inconsistent choices of training and evaluation datasets. This paper addresses this difficulty with three major contributions. First, we examine the inconsistencies of training and evaluation datasets, and the performance gap results from inconsistencies. Sec
Scene text recognition (STR) task has a common practice: All state-of-the-art STR models are trained on large synthetic data. In contrast to this practice, training STR models only on fewer real labels (STR with fewer labels) is important when we have to train STR models without synthetic data: for handwritten or artistic texts that are difficult to generate synthetically and for languages other than English for which we do not always have synthetic data. However, there has been implicit common
Many new proposals for scene text recognition (STR) models have been introduced in recent years. While each claim to have pushed the boundary of the technology, a holistic and fair comparison has been largely missing in the field due to the inconsistent choices of training and evaluation datasets. This paper addresses this difficulty with three major contributions. First, we examine the inconsistencies of training and evaluation datasets, and the performance gap results from inconsistencies. Sec
Scene text recognition (STR) task has a common practice: All state-of-the-art STR models are trained on large synthetic data. In contrast to this practice, training STR models only on fewer real labels (STR with fewer labels) is important when we have to train STR models without synthetic data: for handwritten or artistic texts that are difficult to generate synthetically and for languages other than English for which we do not always have synthetic data. However, there has been implicit common
Recognizing irregular texts has been a challenging topic in text recognition. To encourage research on this topic, we provide a novel comic onomatopoeia dataset (COO), which consists of onomatopoeia texts in Japanese comics. COO has many arbitrary texts, such as extremely curved, partially shrunk texts, or arbitrarily placed texts. Furthermore, some texts are separated into several parts. Each part is a truncated text and is not meaningful by itself. These parts should be linked to represent the
In this paper, we investigate cross-lingual learning (CLL) for multilingual scene text recognition (STR). CLL transfers knowledge from one language to another. We aim to find the condition that exploits knowledge from high-resource languages for improving performance in low-resource languages. To do so, we first examine if two general insights about CLL discussed in previous works are applied to multilingual STR: (1) Joint learning with high- and low-resource languages may reduce performance on
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Manga, or Japanese comics, is a richly multimodal narrative form that blends images and text in complex ways. Teaching large multimodal models (LMMs) to understand such narratives at a human-like level could help manga creators reflect on and refine their stories. To this end, we introduce two benchmarks for multimodal manga understanding: MangaOCR, which targets in-page text recognition, and MangaVQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate contextual understanding through visual question answer
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance in English, but their effectiveness in Japanese remains limited due to the lack of high-quality training data.Current Japanese LMMs often rely on translated English datasets, restricting their ability to capture Japan-specific cultural knowledge.To address this, we explore the potential of Japanese PDF data as a training resource, an area that remains largely underutilized.We introduce a fully automated pipeline that leverages p
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