English

Fooling OCR Systems with Adversarial Text Images

Machine Learning 2018-02-16 v1 Artificial Intelligence Cryptography and Security Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

We demonstrate that state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) based on deep learning is vulnerable to adversarial images. Minor modifications to images of printed text, which do not change the meaning of the text to a human reader, cause the OCR system to "recognize" a different text where certain words chosen by the adversary are replaced by their semantic opposites. This completely changes the meaning of the output produced by the OCR system and by the NLP applications that use OCR for preprocessing their inputs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.05385,
  title  = {Fooling OCR Systems with Adversarial Text Images},
  author = {Congzheng Song and Vitaly Shmatikov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.05385},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:23:03.163Z