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Auteurs principaux: Ye, Xingsong, Du, Yongkun, Zhang, JiaXin, Li, Chen, Lyu, Jing, Chen, Zhineng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06450
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author Ye, Xingsong
Du, Yongkun
Zhang, JiaXin
Li, Chen
Lyu, Jing
Chen, Zhineng
author_facet Ye, Xingsong
Du, Yongkun
Zhang, JiaXin
Li, Chen
Lyu, Jing
Chen, Zhineng
contents Large-scale and categorical-balanced text data is essential for training effective Scene Text Recognition (STR) models, which is hard to achieve when collecting real data. Synthetic data offers a cost-effective and perfectly labeled alternative. However, its performance often lags behind, revealing a significant domain gap between real and current synthetic data. In this work, we systematically analyze mainstream rendering-based synthetic datasets and identify their key limitations: insufficient diversity in corpus, font, and layout, which restricts their realism in complex scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce UnionST, a strong data engine synthesizes text covering a union of challenging samples and better aligns with the complexity observed in the wild. We then construct UnionST-S, a large-scale synthetic dataset with improved simulations in challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we develop a self-evolution learning (SEL) framework for effective real data annotation. Experiments show that models trained on UnionST-S achieve significant improvements over existing synthetic datasets. They even surpass real-data performance in certain scenarios. Moreover, when using SEL, the trained models achieve competitive performance by only seeing 9% of real data labels. Code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/UnionST.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06450
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Is Wrong with Synthetic Data for Scene Text Recognition? A Strong Synthetic Engine with Diverse Simulations and Self-Evolution
Ye, Xingsong
Du, Yongkun
Zhang, JiaXin
Li, Chen
Lyu, Jing
Chen, Zhineng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large-scale and categorical-balanced text data is essential for training effective Scene Text Recognition (STR) models, which is hard to achieve when collecting real data. Synthetic data offers a cost-effective and perfectly labeled alternative. However, its performance often lags behind, revealing a significant domain gap between real and current synthetic data. In this work, we systematically analyze mainstream rendering-based synthetic datasets and identify their key limitations: insufficient diversity in corpus, font, and layout, which restricts their realism in complex scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce UnionST, a strong data engine synthesizes text covering a union of challenging samples and better aligns with the complexity observed in the wild. We then construct UnionST-S, a large-scale synthetic dataset with improved simulations in challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we develop a self-evolution learning (SEL) framework for effective real data annotation. Experiments show that models trained on UnionST-S achieve significant improvements over existing synthetic datasets. They even surpass real-data performance in certain scenarios. Moreover, when using SEL, the trained models achieve competitive performance by only seeing 9% of real data labels. Code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/UnionST.
title What Is Wrong with Synthetic Data for Scene Text Recognition? A Strong Synthetic Engine with Diverse Simulations and Self-Evolution
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06450