A Tibetan Scene Text Dataset under Natural Degradation

Different from datasets acquired under controlled conditions or generated by synthetic degradation, TibNST focuses on naturally degraded text images captured in real environments. The dataset covers multiple practical scenarios, including commercial advertisements, road and directional signs, street posters, public notices, and temple-related scenes. TibNST contains 2046 Tibetan scene text samples.

Each text instance is manually verified and transcribed by annotators with Tibetan reading ability, and the corresponding text-region location and line-level transcription are provided to ensure annotation reliability. The dataset therefore reflects real degradation factors in plateau environments, such as illumination imbalance, blur, scattering, low contrast, edge erosion, and background interference, which can damage Tibetan structural cues and increase recognition difficulty. During data collection, TibNST is formed into two subsets according to the observed degree of natural degradation, namely Subset1 and Subset2.