Recently fast arbitrary-shaped text detection has become an attractive research topic. However, most existing methods are non-real-time, which may fall short in intelligent systems. Although a few real-time text methods are proposed, the detection accuracy is far behind non-real-time methods. To improve the detection accuracy and speed simultaneously, we propose a novel fast and accurate text detection framework, namely CM-Net, which is constructed based on a new text representation method and a multi-perspective feature (MPF) module. The former can fit arbitrary-shaped text contours by concentric mask (CM) in an efficient and robust way. The latter encourages the network to learn more CM-related discriminative features from multiple perspectives and brings no extra computational cost. Benefiting the advantages of CM and MPF, the proposed CM-Net only needs to predict one CM of the text instance to rebuild the text contour and achieves the best balance between detection accuracy and speed compared with previous works. Moreover, to ensure that multi-perspective features are effectively learned, the multi-factor constraints loss is proposed. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed CM is efficient and robust to fit arbitrary-shaped text instances, and also validate the effectiveness of MPF and constraints loss for discriminative text features recognition. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed CM-Net is superior to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) real-time text detection methods in both detection speed and accuracy on MSRA-TD500, CTW1500, Total-Text, and ICDAR2015 datasets.
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）；Guangzhou University（广州大学）；Mashang Consumer Finance Co., Ltd.（马上消费金融股份有限公司）
Due to the large success in object detection and instance segmentation, Mask R-CNN attracts great attention and is widely adopted as a strong baseline for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection and spotting. However, two issues remain to be settled. The first is dense text case, which is easy to be neglected but quite practical. There may exist multiple instances in one proposal, which makes it difficult for the mask head to distinguish different instances and degrades the performance. In this work, we argue that the performance degradation results from the learning confusion issue in the mask …
China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；Engineering Research Center of Mine Digitization, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China（中华人民共和国教育部矿山数字化工程研究中心）
Arbitrary-shaped scene text detection is a challenging task due to the variety of text changes in font, size, color, and orientation. Most existing regression based methods resort to regress the masks or contour points of text regions to model the text instances. However, regressing the complete masks requires high training complexity, and contour points are not sufficient to capture the details of highly curved texts. To tackle the above limitations, we propose a novel light-weight anchor-free text detection framework called TextDCT, which adopts the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to encode …
Institute of Technology for Nanostructures (NST)（纳米结构技术研究所（NST））；Center for Nanointegration Duisburg-Essen (CENIDE)（杜伊斯堡-埃森纳米集成中心（CENIDE））；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）
Fiber-shaped materials (e.g. carbon nano tubes) are of great relevance, due to their unique properties but also the health risk they can impose. Unfortunately, image-based analysis of fibers still involves manual annotation, which is a time-consuming and costly process. We therefore propose the use of region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs) to automate this task. Mask R-CNN, the most widely used R-CNN for semantic segmentation tasks, is prone to errors when it comes to the analysis of fiber-shaped objects. Hence, a new architecture - FibeR-CNN - is introduced and validated. FibeR-C…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院（KIT））
Recent advances in the area of plane segmentation from single RGB images show strong accuracy improvements and now allow a reliable segmentation of indoor scenes into planes. Nonetheless, fine-grained details of these segmentation masks are still lacking accuracy, thus restricting the usability of such techniques on a larger scale in numerous applications, such as inpainting for Augmented Reality use cases. We propose a post-processing algorithm to align the segmented plane masks with edges detected in the image. This allows us to increase the accuracy of state-of-the-art approaches, while lim…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
One of the main challenges for arbitrary-shaped text detection is to design a good text instance representation that allows networks to learn diverse text geometry variances. Most of existing methods model text instances in image spatial domain via masks or contour point sequences in the Cartesian or the polar coordinate system. However, the mask representation might lead to expensive post-processing, while the point sequence one may have limited capability to model texts with highly-curved shapes. To tackle these problems, we model text instances in the Fourier domain and propose one novel Fo…
MEVL-STP: Multi-Encoder and Vision Language Model for Arbitrarily Shaped Scene Text Spotting
Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology（拉吉夫·甘地石油技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology (ISM) Dhanbad（印度理工学院（ISM）丹巴德分校）；University of Salford（索尔福德大学）
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Inpainting arbitrary missing regions is challenging because learning valid features for various masked regions is nontrivial. Though U-shaped encoder-decoder frameworks have been witnessed to be successful, most of them share a common drawback of mask unawareness in feature extraction because all convolution windows (or regions), including those with various shapes of missing pixels, are treated equally and filtered with fixed learned kernels. To this end, we propose our novel mask-aware inpainting solution. Firstly, a Mask-Aware Dynamic Filtering (MADF) module is designed to effectively learn…
Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）
Text detection/localization, as an important task in computer vision, has witnessed substantialadvancements in methodology and performance with convolutional neural networks. However, the vastmajority of popular methods use rectangles or quadrangles to describe text regions. These representationshave inherent drawbacks, especially relating to dense adjacent text and loose regional text boundaries,which usually cause difficulty detecting arbitrarily shaped text. In this paper, we propose a novel text regionrepresentation method, with a robust pipeline, which can precisely detect dense adjacent …
Text detection, the key technology for understanding scene text, has become an attractive research topic. For detecting various scene texts, researchers propose plenty of detectors with different advantages: detection-based models enjoy fast detection speed, and segmentation-based algorithms are not limited by text shapes. However, for most intelligent systems, the detector needs to detect arbitrary-shaped texts with high speed and accuracy simultaneously. Thus, in this study, we design an efficient pipeline named as MT, which can detect adhesive arbitrary-shaped texts with only a single binar…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Salesforce（赛富时）
Detection and recognition of scene texts of arbitrary shapes remain a grand challenge due to the super-rich text shape variation in text line orientations, lengths, curvatures, etc. This paper presents a mask-guided multi-task network that detects and rectifies scene texts of arbitrary shapes reliably. Three types of keypoints are detected which specify the centre line and so the shape of text instances accurately. In addition, four types of keypoint links are detected of which the horizontal links associate the detected keypoints of each text instance and the vertical links predict a pair of …
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
We introduce Mask-ToF, a method to reduce flying pixels (FP) in time-of-flight (ToF) depth captures. FPs are pervasive artifacts which occur around depth edges, where light paths from both an object and its background are integrated over the aperture. This light mixes at a sensor pixel to produce erroneous depth estimates, which can adversely affect downstream 3D vision tasks. Mask-ToF starts at the source of these FPs, learning a microlens-level occlusion mask which effectively creates a custom-shaped sub-aperture for each sensor pixel. This modulates the selection of foreground and backgroun…
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…
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…
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 existi…
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…
While common image object detection tasks focus on bounding boxes or segmentation masks as object representations, we consider the problem of finding objects based on four arbitrary vertices. We propose a novel model, named TetraPackNet, to tackle this problem. TetraPackNet is based on CornerNet and uses similar algorithms and ideas. It is designated for applications requiring high-accuracy detection of regularly shaped objects, which is the case in the logistics use-case of packaging structure recognition. We evaluate our model on our specific real-world dataset for this use-case. Baselined a…
Fully supervised change detection methods require difficult to procure pixel-level labels, while weakly supervised approaches can be trained with image-level labels. However, most of these approaches require a combination of changed and unchanged image pairs for training. Thus, these methods can not directly be used for datasets where only changed image pairs are available. We present W-CDNet, a novel weakly supervised change detection network that can be trained with image-level semantic labels. Additionally, W-CDNet can be trained with two different types of datasets, either containing chang…
Pathological diagnosis is the gold standard for cancer diagnosis, but it is labor-intensive, in which tasks such as cell detection, classification, and counting are particularly prominent. A common solution for automating these tasks is using nucleus segmentation technology. However, it is hard to train a robust nucleus segmentation model, due to several challenging problems, the nucleus adhesion, stacking, and excessive fusion with the background. Recently, some researchers proposed a series of automatic nucleus segmentation methods based on point annotation, which can significant improve the…
