Authors: Wei Liu, Chaofeng Chen, Bingbin Liu, Kwan-Yee Kenneth Wong

Description: They propose a Character-Aware Attention Network (Char-Net) for scene text with large spatial deformations. Their Char-Net consists of a hierarchical feature encoder and a LSTM- based decoder. The newly proposed encoder is able to encode the original text image from both word and character levels, which enables our Char-Net to handle severely distorted scene text. The whole neural network can be optimised in an end-to-end fashion. All the training data comes from public datasets for scene text recognition.