Hunter Heidenreich | ML Research Scientist — Page 21

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
4-tert-butylphenol molecular structure diagram for Image2SMILES OCSR

Image2SMILES: Transformer OCSR with Synthetic Data Pipeline

A Transformer-based system for optical chemical structure recognition introducing a comprehensive data generation pipeline (FG-SMILES, Markush structures, visual contamination) achieving 79% accuracy on real-world images, outperforming rule-based systems like OSRA.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Bromobenzene molecular structure diagram for MICER OCSR

MICER: Molecular Image Captioning with Transfer Learning

MICER treats optical chemical structure recognition as an image captioning task, using transfer learning with a fine-tuned ResNet encoder and attention-based LSTM decoder to convert molecular images into SMILES strings, reaching 97.54% sequence accuracy on synthetic data and 82.33% on real-world images.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

MolMiner: Deep Learning OCSR with YOLOv5 Detection

MolMiner replaces traditional rule-based vectorization with a deep learning object detection pipeline (YOLOv5) to extract chemical structures from PDFs. It outperforms open-source baselines on four benchmarks and introduces a new real-world dataset of 3,040 images.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Patch-based classification pipeline showing overlapping green and blue grids over a chemical image with Markush indicators highlighted in red.

One Strike, You're Out: Detecting Markush Structures

Proposes a patch-based image processing pipeline using Inception V3 to filter Markush structures from chemical documents, outperforming traditional fixed-feature (ORB) methods on low-SNR images.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

Review of OCSR Techniques and Models (Musazade 2022)

This systematization paper traces the history of OCSR, comparing early rule-based systems like OSRA with modern deep learning approaches like DECIMER. It highlights the shift from image classification to image captioning and identifies critical gaps in dataset standardization and evaluation metrics.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

String Representations for Chemical Image Recognition

This empirical study isolates the impact of chemical string representations on image-to-text translation models. It finds that while SMILES offers the highest overall accuracy, SELFIES provides a guarantee of structural validity, offering a trade-off for OCSR tasks.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
4-chlorofluorobenzene molecular structure diagram for SwinOCSR

SwinOCSR: End-to-End Chemical OCR with Swin Transformers

Proposes an end-to-end architecture replacing standard CNN backbones with Swin Transformer to capture global image context. Introduces Multi-label Focal Loss to handle severe token imbalance in chemical datasets.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

A Review of Optical Chemical Structure Recognition Tools

This paper reviews three decades of OCSR development, transitioning from rule-based heuristics to early deep learning approaches. It includes a benchmark study comparing the performance of three open-source tools (OSRA, Imago, MolVec) on four diverse datasets.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
ChemGrapher pipeline overview showing segmentation and classification stages

ChemGrapher: Deep Learning for Chemical Graph OCSR

ChemGrapher replaces rule-based chemical OCR with a deep learning pipeline using semantic segmentation to identify atom and bond candidates, followed by specialized classification networks to resolve stereochemistry and bond multiplicity, reducing error rates compared to OSRA across all tested styles.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Encoder-decoder architecture translating a chemical structure bitmap into a SMILES string

DECIMER: Deep Learning for Chemical Image Recognition

DECIMER adapts the “Show, Attend and Tell” image captioning architecture to translate chemical structure images into SMILES strings. By leveraging massive synthetic datasets generated from PubChem, it demonstrates that deep learning can perform optical chemical recognition without complex, hand-engineered rule systems.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Thymol molecular structure diagram for Staker deep learning OCSR

Deep Learning for Molecular Structure Extraction (2019)

This paper presents a two-stage deep learning pipeline to extract chemical structures from documents and convert them to SMILES strings. By training on large-scale synthetic data, the method overcomes the brittleness of rule-based systems and demonstrates high accuracy even on low-resolution and noisy input images.

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Handwritten chemical ring recognition neural network architecture

Handwritten Chemical Ring Recognition with Neural Networks

Proposes a specialized Classifier-Recognizer architecture that first categorizes rings by heteroatom (S, N, O) and then identifies the specific ring using optimized grid inputs.