We propose an end-to-end trainable network that can simultaneously detect and recognize text of arbitrary shape, making substantial progress on the open problem of reading scene text of irregular shape. We formulate arbitrary shape text detection as an instance segmentation problem; an attention model is then used to decode the textual content of each irregularly shaped text region without rectification. To extract useful irregularly shaped text instance features from image scale features, we propose a simple yet effective RoI masking step. Additionally, we show that predictions from an existing multi-step OCR engine can be leveraged as partially labeled training data, which leads to significant improvements in both the detection and recognition accuracy of our model. Our method surpasses the state-of-the-art for end-to-end recognition tasks on the ICDAR15 (straight) benchmark by 4.6%, and on the Total-Text (curved) benchmark by more than 16%.
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Scene video text spotting (SVTS) is a very important research topic because of many real-life applications. However, only a little effort has put to spotting scene video text, in contrast to massive studies of scene text spotting in static images. Due to various environmental interferences like motion blur, spotting scene video text becomes very challenging. To promote this research area, this competition introduces a new challenge dataset containing 129 video clips from 21 natural scenarios in full annotations. The competition containts three tasks, that is, video text detection (Task 1), vid…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Recently, end-to-end text spotting that aims to detect and recognize text from cluttered images simultaneously has received particularly growing interest in computer vision. Different from the existing approaches that formulate text detection as bounding box extraction or instance segmentation, we localize a set of points on the boundary of each text instance. With the representation of such boundary points, we establish a simple yet effective scheme for end-to-end text spotting, which can read the text of arbitrary shapes. Experiments on three challenging datasets, including ICDAR2015, TotalT…
Scene-text spotting is a task that predicts a text area on natural scene images and recognizes its text characters simultaneously. It has attracted much attention in recent years due to its wide applications. Existing research has mainly focused on improving text region detection, not text recognition. Thus, while detection accuracy is improved, the end-to-end accuracy is insufficient. Texts in natural scene images tend to not be a random string of characters but a meaningful string of characters, a word. Therefore, we propose adversarial learning of semantic representations for scene text spo…
SenseTime Group Ltd.（商汤集团有限公司）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Incidental scene text spotting is considered one of the most difficult and valuable challenges in the document analysis community. Most existing methods treat text detection and recognition as separate tasks. In this work, we propose a unified end-to-end trainable Fast Oriented Text Spotting (FOTS) network for simultaneous detection and recognition, sharing computation and visual information among the two complementary tasks. Specially, RoIRotate is introduced to share convolutional features between detection and recognition. Benefiting from convolution sharing strategy, our FOTS has little co…
Texas A&M University（德州农工大学）；Kwai Inc.（快手公司）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based video text spotting has been extensively used in civil and military domains. UAV's limited battery capacity motivates us to develop an energy-efficient video text spotting solution. In this paper, we first revisit RCNN's crop & resize training strategy and empirically find that it outperforms aligned RoI sampling on a real-world video text dataset captured by UAV. To reduce energy consumption, we further propose a multi-stage image processor that takes videos' redundancy, continuity, and mixed degradation into account. Lastly, the model is pruned and quant…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies（华为云计算技术有限公司）
Existing scene text spotting (i.e., end-to-end text detection and recognition) methods rely on costly bounding box annotations (e.g., text-line, word-level, or character-level bounding boxes). For the first time, we demonstrate that training scene text spotting models can be achieved with an extremely low-cost annotation of a single-point for each instance. We propose an end-to-end scene text spotting method that tackles scene text spotting as a sequence prediction task. Given an image as input, we formulate the desired detection and recognition results as a sequence of discrete tokens and use…
Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
End-to-end text spotting has attached great attention recently due to its benefits on global optimization and high maintainability for real applications. However, the input scale has always been a tough trade-off since recognizing a small text instance usually requires enlarging the whole image, which brings high computational costs. In this paper, to address this problem, we propose a novel cost-efficient Dynamic Low-resolution Distillation (DLD) text spotting framework, which aims to infer images in different small but recognizable resolutions and achieve a better balance between accuracy an…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）
In this paper, we present TExt Spotting TRansformers (TESTR), a generic end-to-end text spotting framework using Transformers for text detection and recognition in the wild. TESTR builds upon a single encoder and dual decoders for the joint text-box control point regression and character recognition. Other than most existing literature, our method is free from Region-of-Interest operations and heuristics-driven post-processing procedures; TESTR is particularly effective when dealing with curved text-boxes where special cares are needed for the adaptation of the traditional bounding-box represe…
TALP Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学TALP研究中心）；Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC)（工业机器人与信息技术研究所（西班牙国家研究委员会-加泰罗尼亚理工大学））
Many current state-of-the-art methods for text recognition are based on purely local information and ignore the semantic correlation between text and its surrounding visual context. In this paper, we propose a post-processing approach to improve the accuracy of text spotting by using the semantic relation between the text and the scene. We initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network that provides a series of text hypotheses for each input image. These text hypotheses are then re-ranked using the semantic relatedness with the object in the image. As a result of this combination, the …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Video text spotting is still an important research topic due to its various real-applications. Previous approaches usually fall into the four-staged pipeline: text detection in individual images, framewisely recognizing localized text regions, tracking text streams and generating final results with complicated post-processing skills, which might suffer from the huge computational cost as well as the interferences of low-quality text. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust video text spotting framework by only recognizing the localized text one-time instead of frame-wisely recognition. Spe…
Understanding the meaning of text in images of natural scenes like highway signs or store front emblems is particularly challenging if the text is foreshortened in the image or the letters are artistically distorted. We introduce a pipeline-based text spotting framework that can both detect and recognize text in various fonts, shapes, and orientations in natural scene images with complicated backgrounds. The main contribution of our work is the text detection component, which we call UHT, short for UNet, Heatmap, and Textfill. UHT uses a UNet to compute heatmaps for candidate text regions and …
Recent end-to-end scene text spotters have achieved great improvement in recognizing arbitrary-shaped text instances. Common approaches for text spotting use region of interest pooling or segmentation masks to restrict features to single text instances. However, this makes it hard for the recognizer to decode correct sequences when the detection is not accurate i.e. one or more characters are cropped out. Considering that it is hard to accurately decide word boundaries with only the detector, we propose a novel Detection-agnostic End-to-End Recognizer, DEER, framework. The proposed method redu…
This paper presents our proposed methods to ICDAR 2021 Robust Reading Challenge - Integrated Circuit Text Spotting and Aesthetic Assessment (ICDAR RRC-ICTEXT 2021). For the text spotting task, we detect the characters on integrated circuit and classify them based on yolov5 detection model. We balance the lowercase and non-lowercase by using SynthText, generated data and data sampler. We adopt semi-supervised algorithm and distillation to furtherly improve the model's accuracy. For the aesthetic assessment task, we add a classification branch of 3 classes to differentiate the aesthetic classes …
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Huawei Cloud AI（华为云人工智能部门）；IntSig Information Co., Ltd（合合信息科技股份有限公司）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
End-to-end scene text spotting has attracted great attention in recent years due to the success of excavating the intrinsic synergy of the scene text detection and recognition. However, recent state-of-the-art methods usually incorporate detection and recognition simply by sharing the backbone, which does not directly take advantage of the feature interaction between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end scene text spotting framework termed SwinTextSpotter. Using a transformer encoder with dynamic head as the detector, we unify the two tasks with a novel Recognition Convers…
We introduce an algorithm for word-level text spotting that is able to accurately and reliably determine the bounding regions of individual words of text "in the wild". Our system is formed by the cascade of two convolutional neural networks. The first network is fully convolutional and is in charge of detecting areas containing text. This results in a very reliable but possibly inaccurate segmentation of the input image. The second network (inspired by the popular YOLO architecture) analyzes each segment produced in the first stage, and predicts oriented rectangular regions containing individ…
In the deployment of scene-text spotting systems on mobile platforms, lightweight models with low computation are preferable. In concept, end-to-end (E2E) text spotting is suitable for such purposes because it performs text detection and recognition in a single model. However, current state-of-the-art E2E methods rely on heavy feature extractors, recurrent sequence modellings, and complex shape aligners to pursue accuracy, which means their computations are still heavy. We explore the opposite direction: How far can we go without bells and whistles in E2E text spotting? To this end, we propose…
Word length-aware text spotting: Enhancing detection and recognition in dense text image
Wuhan Institute of Technology（武汉工程大学）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robot（湖北省智能机器人重点实验室）；Hubei University of Arts and Science（湖北文理学院）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Nanjing University（南京大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Scene text detection and recognition have been well explored in the past few years. Despite the progress, efficient and accurate end-to-end spotting of arbitrarily-shaped text remains challenging. In this work, we propose an end-to-end text spotting framework, termed PAN++, which can efficiently detect and recognize text of arbitrary shapes in natural scenes. PAN++ is based on the kernel representation that reformulates a text line as a text kernel (central region) surrounded by peripheral pixels. By systematically comparing with existing scene text representations, we show that our kernel rep…
Hikvision Research Institute, China（海康威视研究院）；Zhejiang University, China（浙江大学）
Many approaches have recently been proposed to detect irregular scene text and achieved promising results. However, their localization results may not well satisfy the following text recognition part mainly because of two reasons: 1) recognizing arbitrary shaped text is still a challenging task, and 2) prevalent non-trainable pipeline strategies between text detection and text recognition will lead to suboptimal performances. To handle this incompatibility problem, in this paper we propose an end-to-end trainable text spotting approach named Text Perceptron. Concretely, Text Perceptron first e…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；Samsung Research（三星研究院）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Text spotting in natural scene images is of great importance for many image understanding tasks. It includes two sub-tasks: text detection and recognition. In this work, we propose a unified network that simultaneously localizes and recognizes text with a single forward pass, avoiding intermediate processes such as image cropping and feature re-calculation, word separation, and character grouping. In contrast to existing approaches that consider text detection and recognition as two distinct tasks and tackle them one by one, the proposed framework settles these two tasks concurrently. The whol…
LRANet++: Low-Rank Approximation Network for Accurate and Efficient Text Spotting
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University（复旦大学可信具身人工智能研究院）；School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学信息科学与技术学院）
GoMatching++: Parameter- and Data-Efficient Arbitrary-Shaped Video Text Spotting and Benchmarking
School of Computer Science, National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University（计算机学院、多媒体软件国家工程研究中心及人工智能学院，武汉大学）
University of Malaya（马来亚大学）；ViTrox Technologies Sdn. Bhd.（ViTrox科技有限公司）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Baidu（百度）；Webank（微众银行）
With hundreds of thousands of electronic chip components are being manufactured every day, chip manufacturers have seen an increasing demand in seeking a more efficient and effective way of inspecting the quality of printed texts on chip components. The major problem that deters this area of research is the lacking of realistic text on chips datasets to act as a strong foundation. Hence, a text on chips dataset, ICText is used as the main target for the proposed Robust Reading Challenge on Integrated Circuit Text Spotting and Aesthetic Assessment (RRC-ICText) 2021 to encourage the research on …
In this work, we jointly address the problem of text detection and recognition in natural scene images based on convolutional recurrent neural networks. We propose a unified network that simultaneously localizes and recognizes text with a single forward pass, avoiding intermediate processes like image cropping and feature re-calculation, word separation, or character grouping. In contrast to existing approaches that consider text detection and recognition as two distinct tasks and tackle them one by one, the proposed framework settles these two tasks concurrently. The whole framework can be tr…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）
Scene text spotting is of great importance to the computer vision community due to its wide variety of applications. Recent methods attempt to introduce linguistic knowledge for challenging recognition rather than pure visual classification. However, how to effectively model the linguistic rules in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we argue that the limited capacity of language models comes from 1) implicit language modeling; 2) unidirectional feature representation; and 3) language model with noise input. Correspondingly, we propose an autonomous, bidirecti…
TextBlockV2: Towards Precise-Detection-Free Scene Text Spotting with Pre-trained Language Model
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Lenovo Research（联想研究院）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学网络空间科学与工程学院）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Megvii (Face++) Inc.（旷视（Face++）公司）
Unifying text detection and text recognition in an end-to-end training fashion has become a new trend for reading text in the wild, as these two tasks are highly relevant and complementary. 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 named as Mask TextSpotter is presented. Different from the previous text spotters that follow the pipeline consisting of a proposal generation network and a sequence-to-sequence recognition network, Mask TextSpotter enjoys a sim…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
End-to-end text spotting aims to integrate scene text detection and recognition into a unified framework. Dealing with the relationship between the two sub-tasks plays a pivotal role in designing effective spotters. Although Transformer-based methods eliminate the heuristic post-processing, they still suffer from the synergy issue between the sub-tasks and low training efficiency. In this paper, we present DeepSolo, a simple DETR-like baseline that lets a single Decoder with Explicit Points Solo for text detection and recognition simultaneously. Technically, for each text instance, we represen…
GoMatching: A Simple Baseline for Video Text Spotting via Long and Short Term Matching
Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University（武汉大学人工智能研究院）；College of Computing & Data Science at Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Facebook AI（Facebook人工智能）
Recent end-to-end trainable methods for scene text spotting, integrating detection and recognition, showed much progress. However, most of the current arbitrary-shape scene text spotters use region proposal networks (RPN) to produce proposals. RPN relies heavily on manually designed anchors and its proposals are represented with axis-aligned rectangles. The former presents difficulties in handling text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes, and the latter often includes multiple neighboring instances into a single proposal, in cases of densely oriented text. To tackle these pr…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；ByteDance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Recently, Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) techniques have greatly benefited various vision-language tasks by jointly learning visual and textual representations, which intuitively helps in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks due to the rich visual and textual information in scene text images. However, these methods cannot well cope with OCR tasks because of the difficulty in both instance-level text encoding and image-text pair acquisition (i.e. images and captured texts in them). This paper presents a weakly supervised pre-training method, oCLIP, which can acquire effective scene tex…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
End-to-end text-spotting, which aims to integrate detection and recognition in a unified framework, has attracted increasing attention due to its simplicity of the two complimentary tasks. It remains an open problem especially when processing arbitrarily-shaped text instances. Previous methods can be roughly categorized into two groups: character-based and segmentation-based, which often require character-level annotations and/or complex post-processing due to the unstructured output. Here, we tackle end-to-end text spotting by presenting Adaptive Bezier Curve Network v2 (ABCNet v2). Our main …
TALP Research Center（TALP研究中心）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC)（工业机器人与信息技术研究所（西班牙国家研究委员会-加泰罗尼亚理工大学））
Many scene text recognition approaches are based on purely visual information and ignore the semantic relation between scene and text. In this paper, we tackle this problem from natural language processing perspective to fill the gap between language and vision. We propose a post-processing approach to improve scene text recognition accuracy by using occurrence probabilities of words (unigram language model), and the semantic correlation between scene and text. For this, we initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network, already trained with a large amount of data, which provides a ser…
Recently end-to-end scene text spotting has become a popular research topic due to its advantages of global optimization and high maintainability in real applications. Most methods attempt to develop various region of interest (RoI) operations to concatenate the detection part and the sequence recognition part into a two-stage text spotting framework. However, in such framework, the recognition part is highly sensitive to the detected results (e.g.), the compactness of text contours). To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Mask AttentioN Guided One-stage text spotting frame…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Alibaba-Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Scene text spotting aims to detect and recognize the entire word or sentence with multiple characters in natural images. It is still challenging because ambiguity often occurs when the spacing between characters is large or the characters are evenly spread in multiple rows and columns, making many visually plausible groupings of the characters (e.g. "BERLIN" is incorrectly detected as "BERL" and "IN" in Fig. 1(c)). Unlike previous works that merely employed visual features for text detection, this work proposes a novel text spotter, named Ambiguity Eliminating Text Spotter (AE TextSpotter), wh…
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC（机器人与工业信息研究所（CSIC-UPC））
Text Spotting in the wild consists of detecting and recognizing text appearing in images (e.g. signboards, traffic signals or brands in clothing or objects). This is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the context where texts appear (uneven backgrounds, shading, occlusions, perspective distortions, etc.). Only a few approaches try to exploit the relation between text and its surrounding environment to better recognize text in the scene. In this paper, we propose a visual context dataset for Text Spotting in the wild, where the publicly available dataset COCO-text [Veit et al. 2016] …
SwinTextSpotter v2: Towards Better Synergy for Scene Text Spotting
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
EdgeSpotter: Multi-Scale Dense Text Spotting for Industrial Panel Monitoring
School of Mechanical Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学机械工程学院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Wearable Robotics and Human-Machine Interaction, Tongji University（同济大学可穿戴机器人与人机交互重点实验室）；Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong（香港大学计算机科学系）；Department of NANO Fabrication, Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics (SINANO), Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院纳米技术与生物医学研究所）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Recent video text spotting methods usually require the three-staged pipeline, i.e., detecting text in individual images, recognizing localized text, tracking text streams with post-processing to generate final results. These methods typically follow the tracking-by-match paradigm and develop sophisticated pipelines. In this paper, rooted in Transformer sequence modeling, we propose a simple, but effective end-to-end video text DEtection, Tracking, and Recognition framework (TransDETR). TransDETR mainly includes two advantages: 1) Different from the explicit match paradigm in the adjacent frame…
