Reading Between the Mud: A Challenging Motorcycle Racer Number Dataset

Abstract: This paper introduces the off-road motorcycle Racer number Dataset (RnD), a new challenging dataset for optical character recognition (OCR) research. RnD contains 2,411 images from professional motorsports photographers that depict motorcycle racers in off-road competitions. The images exhibit a wide variety of factors that make OCR difficult, including mud occlusions, motion blur, non-standard fonts, glare, complex backgrounds, etc. The dataset has 5,578 manually annotated bounding boxes around visible motorcycle numbers, along with transcribed digits and letters. Our experiments benchmark leading OCR algorithms and reveal an end-to-end F1 score of only 0.527 on RnD, even after fine-tuning. Analysis of performance on different occlusion types shows mud as the primary challenge, degrading accuracy substantially compared to normal conditions. But the models struggle with other factors including glare, blur, shadows, and dust. Analysis exposes substantial room for improvement and highlights failure cases of existing models. RnD represents a valuable new benchmark to drive innovation in real-world OCR capabilities. The authors hope the community will build upon this dataset and baseline experiments to make progress on the open problem of robustly recognizing text in unconstrained natural environments. The dataset is available at https://github.com/JacobTyo/SwinTextSpotter.