Mask TextSpotter: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Spotting Text with Arbitrary Shapes

TL;DR

Mask TextSpotter is an end-to-end trainable neural network that effectively detects and recognizes irregularly shaped scene text, achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

It introduces Mask TextSpotter, a novel model inspired by Mask R-CNN, for simultaneous text detection and recognition of arbitrary-shaped text in natural images.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on ICDAR datasets.

Effectively handles curved and irregular text shapes.

Simplifies the end-to-end training process.

Abstract

Recently, models based on deep neural networks have dominated the fields of scene text detection and recognition. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text spotting, which aims at simultaneous text detection and recognition in natural images. An end-to-end trainable neural network model for scene text spotting is proposed. The proposed model, named as Mask TextSpotter, is inspired by the newly published work Mask R-CNN. Different from previous methods that also accomplish text spotting with end-to-end trainable deep neural networks, Mask TextSpotter takes advantage of simple and smooth end-to-end learning procedure, in which precise text detection and recognition are acquired via semantic segmentation. Moreover, it is superior to previous methods in handling text instances of irregular shapes, for example, curved text. Experiments on ICDAR2013, ICDAR2015 and Total-Text demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in both scene text detection and end-to-end text recognition tasks.