Performance evaluation of GANs in a semisupervised OCR use case

Even in the age of big data, labeled data is a scarce resource in many machine learning use cases. Florian Wilhelm evaluates generative adversarial networks (GANs) when used to extract information from vehicle registrations under a varying amount of labeled data, compares the performance with supervised learning techniques, and demonstrates a significant improvement when using unlabeled data.

Online vehicle marketplaces are embracing artificial intelligence to ease the process of selling a vehicle on their platform. The tedious work of copying information from the vehicle registration document into some web form can be automated with the help of smart text-spotting systems, in which the seller takes a picture of the document, and the necessary information is extracted automatically. Florian Wilhelm details the components of a text-spotting system, including the subtasks of object detection and optical character recognition (OCR). Florian elaborates on the challenges of OCR in documents with various distortions and artifacts, which rule out off-the-shelf products for this task. After offering an overview of semisupervised learning based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), Florian evaluates the performance gains of this method compared to supervised learning. More specifically, for a varying amount of labeled data, he compares the accuracy of a convolution neural network (CNN) to a GAN that uses additional unlabeled data during the training phase, showing that GANs significantly outperform classical CNNs in use cases with a lack of labeled data.