Bharat Scene Text: A Novel Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Indian Language Scene Text Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: De, Anik, Penamakuri, Abhirama Subramanyam, Yadav, Rajeev, Rathore, Aditya, Shah, Harshiv, Sharma, Devesh, Agarwal, Sagar, Kumar, Pravin, Mishra, Anand
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author De, Anik
Penamakuri, Abhirama Subramanyam
Yadav, Rajeev
Rathore, Aditya
Shah, Harshiv
Sharma, Devesh
Agarwal, Sagar
Kumar, Pravin
Mishra, Anand
author_facet De, Anik
Penamakuri, Abhirama Subramanyam
Yadav, Rajeev
Rathore, Aditya
Shah, Harshiv
Sharma, Devesh
Agarwal, Sagar
Kumar, Pravin
Mishra, Anand
contents Reading scene text, that is, text appearing in images, has numerous application areas, including assistive technology, search, and e-commerce. Although scene text recognition in English has advanced significantly and is often considered nearly a solved problem, Indian language scene text recognition remains an open challenge. This is due to script diversity, non-standard fonts, and varying writing styles, and, more importantly, the lack of high-quality datasets and open-source models. To address these gaps, we introduce the Bharat Scene Text Dataset (BSTD) - a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark for studying Indian Language Scene Text Recognition. It comprises more than 100K words that span 11 Indian languages and English, sourced from over 6,500 scene images captured across various linguistic regions of India. The dataset is meticulously annotated and supports multiple scene text tasks, including: (i) Scene Text Detection, (ii) Script Identification, (iii) Cropped Word Recognition, and (iv) End-to-End Scene Text Recognition. We evaluated state-of-the-art models originally developed for English by adapting (fine-tuning) them for Indian languages. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Indian language scene text recognition. We believe that this dataset represents a significant step toward advancing research in this domain. All our models and data are open source.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_23071
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bharat Scene Text: A Novel Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Indian Language Scene Text Understanding
De, Anik
Penamakuri, Abhirama Subramanyam
Yadav, Rajeev
Rathore, Aditya
Shah, Harshiv
Sharma, Devesh
Agarwal, Sagar
Kumar, Pravin
Mishra, Anand
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Reading scene text, that is, text appearing in images, has numerous application areas, including assistive technology, search, and e-commerce. Although scene text recognition in English has advanced significantly and is often considered nearly a solved problem, Indian language scene text recognition remains an open challenge. This is due to script diversity, non-standard fonts, and varying writing styles, and, more importantly, the lack of high-quality datasets and open-source models. To address these gaps, we introduce the Bharat Scene Text Dataset (BSTD) - a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark for studying Indian Language Scene Text Recognition. It comprises more than 100K words that span 11 Indian languages and English, sourced from over 6,500 scene images captured across various linguistic regions of India. The dataset is meticulously annotated and supports multiple scene text tasks, including: (i) Scene Text Detection, (ii) Script Identification, (iii) Cropped Word Recognition, and (iv) End-to-End Scene Text Recognition. We evaluated state-of-the-art models originally developed for English by adapting (fine-tuning) them for Indian languages. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Indian language scene text recognition. We believe that this dataset represents a significant step toward advancing research in this domain. All our models and data are open source.
title Bharat Scene Text: A Novel Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Indian Language Scene Text Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23071