OTS: A One-shot Learning Approach for Text Spotting in Historical Manuscripts

Historical manuscript processing poses challenges like limited annotated training data and novel class emergence. To address this, we propose a novel One-shot learning-based Text Spotting (OTS) approach that accurately and reliably spots novel characters with just one annotated support sample. Drawing inspiration from cognitive research, we introduce a spatial alignment module that finds, focuses on, and learns the most discriminative spatial regions in the query image based on one support image. Especially, since the low-resource spotting task often faces the problem of example imbalance, we propose a novel loss function called torus loss which can make the embedding space of distance metric more discriminative. Our approach is highly efficient and requires only a few training samples while exhibiting the remarkable ability to handle novel characters, and symbols. To enhance dataset diversity, a new manuscript dataset that contains the ancient Dongba hieroglyphics (DBH) is created. We conduct experiments on publicly available VML-HD, TKH, NC datasets, and the new proposed DBH dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that OTS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in one-shot text spotting. Overall, our proposed method offers promising applications in the field of text spotting in historical manuscripts.