SCS: Style and Content Supervision Network for Character Recognition with Unseen Font Style

There is a significant style overfitting problem in traditional content supervision models of character recognition: insufficient generalization ability to recognize the characters with unseen font styles. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a novel framework named Style and Content Supervision (SCS) network, which integrates style and content supervision to resist style overfitting. Different from traditional models only supervised by content labels, SCS simultaneously leverages the style and content supervision to separate the task-specific features of style and content, and then mixes the style-specific and content-specific features using bilinear model to capture the hidden correlation between them. Experimental results prove that the proposed model is able to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on several widely used real world character sets, and it obtains relatively strong robustness when the size of training set is shrinking.