Cloudwalk's Pixel-Anchor takes the first place in the aspect of FMeasure in ICDAR 2015, which can be applied in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence.
Nov 20, The ranking of International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)was reset by Chinese computer vision startup Cloudwalk（云从科技）'s algorithm Pixel-Anchor.
Cloudwalk released the results in its official WeChat account, showing that Cloudwalk's Pixel-Anchor takes the first place in the aspect of FMeasure, a measure of a test's accuracy and is defined as the weighted harmonic mean of the precision and recall of the test. According to Cloudwalk, the Pixel-Anchor can be applied in the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence.
The other four positions out of top five on ICDAR 2015 ranking were all grabbed by China-based university or companies, including Nanjing University and Nanjing University of Science and Technology( with PSENet algorithm), Face++ with Mask Text algorithm, SenseTime (with FOTS algorithm )and Alibaba (with IncepText algorithm).
ICDAR 2015 is an important index in OCR(optical character recognition) field. ICDAR has been attracting 3,500 team form 89 countries to upload their test data, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
According to China Daily, ICDAR 2015 is a pure English text detection sub-data set, used to test algorithm of text detection in natural scene in robust reading competitions established by ICDAR in 2003, aiming to improve text detection and recognition level in natural scene. Comparing with traditional optical character recognition, text detection and recognition in natural scene faces challenges of background interruption, characters blurring and degeneration and unexpected lights but the technology can be applied in more broader fields such as photo analysis, license plate recognition and image advertisement filtering.
Found in 2015, Cloudwalk has raised CNY 1 billion (USD 140 million) in a Series B+ financing round in Oct 2018, which bring total financing to USD 509 million, reported by China Money Network. The participants in the funding round include Chinese state-owned investment institutions China Reform Fund, Atlas Capital Group, SFund International Holdings Limited, Technology Financial Group, Bohai Capital Holding Co. and others.
The investment will be used to support research related to big data, develop and expand AI application platforms, construct research centers, cultivate talent, and fund industrial layouts of AI software and hardware.
Serving more than 1,200 customers in 2018 including China's four state-owned banks and some 400 other banks, Cloudwalk is expected to lead the global market for facial recognition devices.
——Author: LinYan. Write to LinYan at LinYan@EqualOcean.com