Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention mechanism are two main approaches used in recent scene text recognition works. Compared with attention-based methods, CTC decoder has a much shorter inference time, yet a lower accuracy. To design an efficient and effective model, we propose the guided training of CTC (GTC), where CTC model learns a better alignment and feature representations from a more powerful attentional guidance. With the benefit of guided training, CTC model achieves robust and accurate prediction for both regular and irregular scene text while maintaining a fast inference speed. Moreover, to further leverage the potential of CTC decoder, a graph convolutional network (GCN) is proposed to learn the local correlations of extracted features. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our end-to-end model achieves a new state-of-the-art for regular and irregular scene text recognition and needs 6 times shorter inference time than attentionbased methods.
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