Abstract: Aspects of this disclosure include technologies for character-based text detection and recognition. The disclosed single-stage model is configured for joint text detection and word recognition in natural images. In the disclosed solution, a character recognition branch is integrated into a word detection model. This results in an end-to-end trainable model that can implement text detection and word recognition jointly. Further, the disclosed technical solution includes an iterative character detection method, which is configured to generate character-level bounding boxes on real-world images by using synthetic data first.