Which and Where to Focus: A Simple yet Accurate Framework for Arbitrary-Shaped Nearby Text Detection in Scene Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, effective framework for detecting arbitrary-shaped nearby scene texts, utilizing a novel training scheme and feature attention module to improve accuracy on challenging benchmarks.

Contribution

It proposes a One-to-Many Training Scheme and a Proposal Feature Attention Module to enhance arbitrary-shaped nearby text detection, based on a Faster R-CNN baseline.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks.

Effectively handles arbitrary-shaped and nearby texts.

Improves detection accuracy with proposed modules.

Abstract

Scene text detection has drawn the close attention of researchers. Though many methods have been proposed for horizontal and oriented texts, previous methods may not perform well when dealing with arbitrary-shaped texts such as curved texts. In particular, confusion problem arises in the case of nearby text instances. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for accurate arbitrary-shaped nearby scene text detection. Firstly, a One-to-Many Training Scheme (OMTS) is designed to eliminate confusion and enable the proposals to learn more appropriate groundtruths in the case of nearby text instances. Secondly, we propose a Proposal Feature Attention Module (PFAM) to exploit more effective features for each proposal, which can better adapt to arbitrary-shaped text instances. Finally, we propose a baseline that is based on Faster R-CNN and outputs the curve representation directly. Equipped with PFAM and OMTS, the detector can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance on several challenging benchmarks.