HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text Recognition
<|reference_start|>HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text Recognition: Text recognition, especially for complex scripts like Chinese, faces unique challenges due to its intricate character structures and vast vocabulary. Traditional one-hot encoding methods struggle with the representation of hierarchical radicals, recognition of Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) characters, and on-device deployment due to their computational intensity. To address these challenges, we propose HierCode, a novel and lightweight codebook that exploits the innate hierarchical nature of Chinese characters. HierCode employs a multi-hot encoding strategy, leveraging hierarchical binary tree encoding and prototype learning to create distinctive, informative representations for each character. This approach not only facilitates zero-shot recognition of OOV characters by utilizing shared radicals and structures but also excels in line-level recognition tasks by computing similarity with visual features, a notable advantage over existing methods. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, including handwritten, scene, document, web, and ancient text, have showcased HierCode's superiority for both conventional and zero-shot Chinese character or text recognition, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance with significantly fewer parameters and fast inference speed.<|reference_end|>
@article{zhang2024hiercode:,
    title={HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text
  Recognition},
    author={Yuyi Zhang, Yuanzhi Zhu, Dezhi Peng, Peirong Zhang, Zhenhua Yang,
  Zhibo Yang, Cong Yao, Lianwen Jin},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.13761},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.13761},
    primaryClass={cs.CV}
}