Developing effective scene text detection and recognition models hinges on extensive training data, which can be both laborious and costly to obtain, especially for low-resourced languages. Conventional methods tailored for Latin characters often falter with non-Latin scripts due to challenges like character stacking, diacritics, and variable character widths without clear word boundaries. In this paper, we introduce the first Khmer scene-text dataset, featuring 1,544 expert-annotated images, including 997 indoor and 547 outdoor scenes. This diverse dataset includes flat text, raised text, poorly illuminated text, distant and partially obscured text. Annotations provide line-level text and polygonal bounding box coordinates for each scene. The benchmark includes baseline models for scene-text detection and recognition tasks, providing a robust starting point for future research endeavors. The KhmerST dataset is publicly accessible at https://gitlab.com/vannkinhnom123/khmerst.
@article{arxiv.2410.18277,
title = {KhmerST: A Low-Resource Khmer Scene Text Detection and Recognition Benchmark},
author = {Vannkinh Nom and Souhail Bakkali and Muhammad Muzzamil Luqman and Mickaël Coustaty and Jean-Marc Ogier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.18277},
year = {2024}
}