SUST and RUST: Two Datasets for Uyghur Scene Text Recognition

The main objective of scene text recognition is to recognize text in complex images and convert it into editable text. However, scene text recognition research has long been focused on English, and there is a lack of research on other small languages, such as Uyghur language. This paper conducts a series of studies on Uyghur text recognition in natural scenes, with the following main contributions: 1) To address the lack of Uyghur scene text recognition datasets, we established the Synthetic Uyghur Scene Text dataset SUST and the Real Uyghur Scene Text dataset RUST, and we augmented RUST with STR-Aug; 2) The contemporary existing STR models are selected to conduct experiments on the dataset proposed in this paper, through which we search for the model structure suitable for Uyghur scene text recognition; 3) According to the characteristics of Uyghur text, this paper designs a lightweight Uyghur text recognition model named LUSTR, which takes into account both lightweight and accuracy, and achieves good performance in the Uyghur scene text recognition dataset proposed in this paper. The SUST and RUST are now publicly available at https://github.com/kongfnajie/SUST-and-RUST-datasets-for-Uyghur-STR.