CBNet: A Plug-and-Play Network for Segmentation-Based Scene Text Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces CBNet, a plug-and-play network that improves segmentation-based scene text detection by incorporating context-aware and boundary-guided modules, achieving state-of-the-art results efficiently.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel CBNet architecture with context-aware and boundary-guided modules that enhance segmentation accuracy and boundary precision in scene text detection.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks.

Maintains high speed with high-resolution maps.

Can be integrated into various segmentation methods.

Abstract

Recently, segmentation-based methods are quite popular in scene text detection, which mainly contain two steps: text kernel segmentation and expansion. However, the segmentation process only considers each pixel independently, and the expansion process is difficult to achieve a favorable accuracy-speed trade-off. In this paper, we propose a Context-aware and Boundary-guided Network (CBN) to tackle these problems. In CBN, a basic text detector is firstly used to predict initial segmentation results. Then, we propose a context-aware module to enhance text kernel feature representations, which considers both global and local contexts. Finally, we introduce a boundary-guided module to expand enhanced text kernels adaptively with only the pixels on the contours, which not only obtains accurate text boundaries but also keeps high speed, especially on high-resolution output maps. In particular, with a lightweight backbone, the basic detector equipped with our proposed CBN achieves state-of-the-art results on several popular benchmarks, and our proposed CBN can be plugged into several segmentation-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/XiiZhao/cbn.pytorch.