Residual context refinement network architecture for optical character recognition

Techniques for recognizing text in an image are described. An exemplary method may include receiving a request to recognize text in an image; extracting features from the image and generating a visual feature sequence from the extracted features; performing selective contextual refinement at least one selective contextual refinement block of a stack of selective contextual refinement blocks to generate a text prediction by: generating a contextual feature map and combining the contextual feature map with the visual feature sequence into a visual feature space, and applying a selective decoder that utilizes a two-step attention on the visual feature space to generate a text prediction, wherein the two-step attention includes performing a 1-D self-attention computation to generate attentional features and decoding the attentional features to generate the text prediction; and outputting the generated text prediction.