Care Label Recognition

The paper introduces the problem of care label recognition and presents a method addressing it. A care label, also called a care tag, is a small piece of cloth or paper attached to a garment providing instructions for its maintenance and information about e.g. the material and size. The informationand instructions are written as symbols or plain text. Care label recognition is a challenging text and pictogram recognition problem - the often sewn text is small, looking as if printed using a non-standard font; the contrast of the text gradually fades, making OCR progressively more difficult. On the other hand, the information provided is typically redundant and thus it facilitates semi-supervised learning. The presented care label recognition method is based on the recently published End-to-End Method for Multi-LanguageScene Text, E2E-MLT, Busta et al. 2018, exploiting specific constraints, e.g. a care label vocabulary with multi-language equivalences. Experiments conducted on a newly-created dataset of 63 care label images show that even when exploiting problem-specific constraints, a state-of-the-art scene text detection and recognition method achieve precision and recall slightly above 0.6, confirming the challenging nature of the problem.