Accurate Structured-Text Spotting for Arithmetical Exercise Correction

Correcting arithmetical exercise is a labor intensive and time consuming task for primary school teachers all the time. To reduce their burdens, we propose Arithmetical Exercise Checker (AEC), which is the first system that automatically evaluates all arithmetical expressions (AEs) on exercise images. The major challenge is that AE is formed by printed and handwritten texts with particular arithmetical patterns (e.g., multi-line, fraction). Despite being part of AE, handwritten texts usually lead to zigzag boundaries and tangled rows. What's worse, AE may be arithmetical incorrect, which makes the contextual information less valuable for recognition. To tackle these problems, we introduce integrated detection, recognition and evaluation branches by leveraging AE's intrinsic features, namely 1) boundary indistinctive, 2) locally relevant patterns and 3) globally irrelevant symbols. Experimental results demonstrate that AEC yields a 93.72% correction accuracy on 40 kinds of mainstream primary arithmetical exercises. So far, the online service of AEC processes 75, 000 arbitrary exercises on average per day, and already reduced the burden of over 1, 000, 000 users. AEC shows the benefits for implementing an vision-based system as a way to aid teachers in reducing reduplicative tasks.