EKTVQA: Generalized Use of External Knowledge to Empower Scene Text in Text-VQA

The open-ended question answering task of Text-VQA often requires reading and reasoning about <italic>rarely seen or completely unseen</italic> scene text content of an image. We address this zero-shot nature of the task by proposing the generalized use of external knowledge to augment o...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Arka Ujjal Dey, Ernest Valveny, Gaurav Harit
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9807310/
Description
Summary:The open-ended question answering task of Text-VQA often requires reading and reasoning about <italic>rarely seen or completely unseen</italic> scene text content of an image. We address this zero-shot nature of the task by proposing the generalized use of external knowledge to augment our understanding of the scene text. We design a framework to extract, validate, and reason with knowledge using a standard multimodal transformer for vision language understanding tasks. Through empirical evidence and qualitative results, we demonstrate how external knowledge can highlight instance-only cues and thus help deal with training data bias, improve answer entity type correctness, and detect multiword named entities. We generate results comparable to the state-of-the-art on three publicly available datasets under the constraints of similar upstream OCR systems and training data.
ISSN:2169-3536