fatr: a comprehensive dataset and evaluation framework for persian text recognition in wild images

Background and objectives: research on right-to-left scripts, particularly persian text recognition in wild images, is limited due to lacking a comprehensive benchmark dataset. applying state-of-the-art (sota) techniques on existing latin or multilingual datasets often results in poor recognition performance for persian scripts. this study aims to bridge this gap by introducing a comprehensive dataset for persian text recognition and evaluating sota models on it.methods: we propose a farsi (persian) text recognition (fatr) dataset, which includes challenging images captured in various indoor and outdoor environments. additionally, we introduce fatr-synth, the largest synthetic persian text dataset, containing over 200,000 cropped word images designed for pre-training scene text recognition models. we evaluate five sota deep learning-based scene text recognition models using standard word recognition accuracy (wra) metrics on the proposed datasets. we compare the performance of these recent architectures qualitatively on challenging sample images of the fatr dataset.results: our experiments demonstrate that sota recognition models’ performance declines significantly when tested on the fatr dataset. however, when trained on synthetic and real-world persian text datasets, these models demonstrate improved performance on persian scripts.conclusion: introducing the fatr dataset enhances the resources available for persian text recognition, improving model performance. the proposed datasets, trained models, and code is available at https://github.com/zobeirraisi/fatdr.