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DEEP OCR RECOGNITION TRAINING – THE NEXT LEVEL

HALCON’s Deep OCR is very powerful and can detect and recognize text in various industrial scenes. However, what if you have a special font, or want to read foreign characters? With HALCON 22.05 it is possible to train the recognition model to read special alphabet or font you want to read and boost the performance of Deep OCR to fit exactly your application.

As you already know, for any training you need a dataset first. How can you create a suitable Deep OCR dataset?

From Deep Learning Tool 22.06, you can use the new functionality of Deep OCR Labeling. There are two possibilities:

  • You can create the Deep OCR dataset from scratch: Simply initialize a Deep OCR Project in the Deep Learning Tool (screenshot) and load the images that you would like to label. For the labeling you need to draw a rectangle around the word in the reading orientation and a text will be suggested that you could correct or confirm (screenshot).
  • Alternatively, you can use the standard example deep_ocr_prelabel_dataset.hdev. It creates a dataset based on the images to be labeled and the text suggested by the pretrained Deep OCR. You can import the created dataset (hdict file) into Deep Learning Tool 22.06 and correct the suggested labels.

In general, the Training images should comprise a representative set of the possibilities that could occur during the inference. In addition, it is recommended to use a balanced dataset, which means having roughly the same number of occurrences for all characters. And of course, excellent results require a good labeling. A good ground truth bounding box needs to look like an output of the Deep OCR detection model (screenshot). If satisfied with the dataset, you need to export the dataset as an hdict file and proceed to the next step which is the training.

The standard example deep_ocr_recognition_training_workflow.hdev guides you through the training workflow. All you need to do is to import the extracted dataset in the training script and adjust the training parameters. An important parameter is the image width of the recognition model. It must be increased if the dataset contains images of words with a lot of characters in it. Please note that the more the setting of ImageWidth differs from its default (120) the more training data you will need, because the pretrained model was trained on the default width Therefore, it is advisable to keep the image width close to the default (120) during training. The number of epochs needs as well to be adjusted based on the training error and the task complexity.

After training the recognition model, the standard example shows you how to evaluate your finetuned model and to compare it to the pretrained model.

The last step is to integrate the finetuned model in your inference step and get ready to be impressed by the results. As always, more information can be found in the documentation (Solutions Guide I Chapter 19.2). 

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