Current text detection datasets primarily target natural or document scenes, where text typically appear in regular font and shapes, monotonous colors, and orderly layouts. The text usually arranged along straight or curved lines. However, these characteristics differ significantly from anime scenes, where text is often diverse in style, irregularly arranged, and easily confused with complex visual elements such as symbols and decorative patterns. Text in anime scene also includes a large number of handwritten and stylized fonts. Motivated by this gap, we introduce AnimeText, a large-scale dataset containing 735K images and 4.2M annotated text blocks. It features hierarchical annotations and hard negative samples tailored for anime scenarios. %Cross-dataset evaluations using state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that models trained on AnimeText achieve superior performance in anime text detection tasks compared to existing datasets. To evaluate the robustness of AnimeText in complex anime scenes, we conducted cross-dataset benchmarking using state-of-the-art text detection methods. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on AnimeText outperform those trained on existing datasets in anime scene text detection tasks. AnimeText on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/datasets/deepghs/AnimeText
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Existing correspondence datasets for two-dimensional (2D) cartoon suffer from simple frame composition and monotonic movements, making them insufficient to simulate real animations. In this work, we present a new 2D animation visual correspondence dataset, AnimeRun, by converting open source three-dimensional (3D) movies to full scenes in 2D style, including simultaneous moving background and interactions of multiple subjects. Our analyses show that the proposed dataset not only resembles real anime more in image composition, but also possesses richer and more complex motion patterns compared …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Deep learning-based scene text detection can achieve preferable performance, powered with sufficient labeled training data. However, manual labeling is time consuming and laborious. At the extreme, the corresponding annotated data are unavailable. Exploiting synthetic data is a very promising solution except for domain distribution mismatches between synthetic datasets and real datasets. To address the severe domain distribution mismatch, we propose a synthetic-to-real domain adaptation method for scene text detection, which transfers knowledge from synthetic data (source domain) to real data …
Text-based games are becoming commonly used in reinforcement learning as real-world simulation environments. They are usually imperfect information games, and their interactions are only in the textual modality. To challenge these games, it is effective to complement the missing information by providing knowledge outside the game, such as human common sense. However, such knowledge has only been available from textual information in previous works. In this paper, we investigate the advantage of employing commonsense reasoning obtained from visual datasets such as scene graph datasets. In gener…
Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；NAVER LABS Europe（NAVER LABS 欧洲）
Recent models for cross-modal retrieval have benefited from an increasingly rich understanding of visual scenes, afforded by scene graphs and object interactions to mention a few. This has resulted in an improved matching between the visual representation of an image and the textual representation of its caption. Yet, current visual representations overlook a key aspect: the text appearing in images, which may contain crucial information for retrieval. In this paper, we first propose a new dataset that allows exploration of cross-modal retrieval where images contain scene-text instances. Then,…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）
Recently, video scene text detection has received increasing attention due to its comprehensive applications. However, the lack of annotated scene text video datasets has become one of the most important problems, which hinders the development of video scene text detection. The existing scene text video datasets are not large-scale due to the expensive cost caused by manual labeling. In addition, the text instances in these datasets are too clear to be a challenge. To address the above issues, we propose a tracking based semi-automatic labeling strategy for scene text videos in this paper. We …
State-of-the-art scene text detection techniques predict quadrilateral boxes that are prone to localization errors while dealing with straight or curved text lines of different orientations and lengths in scenes. This paper presents a novel multi-scale shape regression network (MSR) that is capable of locating text lines of different lengths, shapes and curvatures in scenes. The proposed MSR detects scene texts by predicting dense text boundary points that inherently capture the location and shape of text lines accurately and are also more tolerant to the variation of text line length as compa…
TextDS: Parameter-Efficient Representation Alignment for Scene Text Detection under Distribution Shifts
School of Electrical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学电气工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学电机及电子工程学系）
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；OrionStar Ltd.（猎户星空有限公司）；University of Western Australia（西澳大学）
Scene text detection has received attention for years and achieved an impressive performance across various benchmarks. In this work, we propose an efficient and accurate approach to detect multioriented text in scene images. The proposed feature fusion mechanism allows us to use a shallower network to reduce the computational complexity. A self-attention mechanism is adopted to suppress false positive detections. Experiments on public benchmarks including ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2015 and MSRA-TD500 show that our proposed approach can achieve better or comparable performances with fewer parameters a…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Meituan（美团）
Scene text detection, which is one of the most popular topics in both academia and industry, can achieve remarkable performance with sufficient training data. However, the annotation costs of scene text detection are huge with traditional labeling methods due to the various shapes of texts. Thus, it is practical and insightful to study simpler labeling methods without harming the detection performance. In this paper, we propose to annotate the texts by scribble lines instead of polygons for text detection. It is a general labeling method for texts with various shapes and requires low labeling …
Most existing scene text detectors focus on detecting characters or words that only capture partial text messages due to missing contextual information. For a better understanding of text in scenes, it is more desired to detect contextual text blocks (CTBs) which consist of one or multiple integral text units (e.g., characters, words, or phrases) in natural reading order and transmit certain complete text messages. This paper presents contextual text detection, a new setup that detects CTBs for better understanding of texts in scenes. We formulate the new setup by a dual detection task which f…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；the University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
It is crucial to understand the robustness of text detection models with regard to extensive corruptions, since scene text detection techniques have many practical applications. For systematically exploring this problem, we propose two datasets from which to evaluate scene text detection models: ICDAR2015-C (IC15-C) and CTW1500-C (CTW-C). Our study extends the investigation of the performance and robustness of the proposed region proposal, regression and segmentation-based scene text detection frameworks. Furthermore, we perform a robustness analysis of six key components: pre-training data, b…
Samsung Research China - Beijing（三星中国研究院-北京）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Samsung Research（三星研究院）
Scene text detection attracts much attention in computer vision, because it can be widely used in many applications such as real-time text translation, automatic information entry, blind person assistance, robot sensing and so on. Though many methods have been proposed for horizontal and oriented texts, detecting irregular shape texts such as curved texts is still a challenging problem. To solve the problem, we propose a robust scene text detection method with adaptive text region representation. Given an input image, a text region proposal network is first used for extracting text proposals. …
Mangalore University（芒格洛尔大学）；KVG College of Engineering（KVG工程学院）
In this paper, we propose a skeleton matching based approach which aids in text localization in scene images. The input image is preprocessed and segmented into blocks using connected component analysis. We obtain the skeleton of the segmented block using morphology based approach. The skeletonized images are compared with the trained templates in the database to categorize into text and non-text blocks. Further, the newly designed geometrical rules and morphological operations are employed on the detected text blocks for scene text localization. The experimental results obtained on publicly a…
Henan University（河南大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
In this paper, we introduce the ShopSign dataset, which is a newly developed natural scene text dataset of Chinese shop signs in street views. Although a few scene text datasets are already publicly available (e.g. ICDAR2015, COCO-Text), there are few images in these datasets that contain Chinese texts/characters. Hence, we collect and annotate the ShopSign dataset to advance research in Chinese scene text detection and recognition. The new dataset has three distinctive characteristics: (1) large-scale: it contains 25,362 Chinese shop sign images, with a total number of 196,010 text-lines. (2)…
Recently, scene text detection has been a challenging task. Texts with arbitrary shape or large aspect ratio are usually hard to detect. Previous segmentation-based methods can describe curve text more accurately but suffer from over segmentation and text adhesion. In this paper, we propose attention-based feature decomposition-reconstruction network for scene text detection, which utilizes contextual information and low-level feature to enhance the performance of segmentation-based text detector. In the phase of feature fusion, we introduce cross level attention module to enrich contextual in…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Recent learning-based approaches show promising performance improvement for scene text removal task. However, these methods usually leave some remnants of text and obtain visually unpleasant results. In this work, we propose a novel "end-to-end" framework based on accurate text stroke detection. Specifically, we decouple the text removal problem into text stroke detection and stroke removal. We design a text stroke detection network and a text removal generation network to solve these two sub-problems separately. Then, we combine these two networks as a processing unit, and cascade this unit t…
Text in curve orientation, despite being one of the common text orientations in real world environment, has close to zero existence in well received scene text datasets such as ICDAR2013 and MSRA-TD500. The main motivation of Total-Text is to fill this gap and facilitate a new research direction for the scene text community. On top of the conventional horizontal and multi-oriented texts, it features curved-oriented text. Total-Text is highly diversified in orientations, more than half of its images have a combination of more than two orientations. Recently, a new breed of solutions that casted…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；GuangZhou University（广州大学）
Scene text editing (STE) aims to replace text with the desired one while preserving background and styles of the original text. However, due to the complicated background textures and various text styles, existing methods fall short in generating clear and legible edited text images. In this study, we attribute the poor editing performance to two problems: 1) Implicit decoupling structure. Previous methods of editing the whole image have to learn different translation rules of background and text regions simultaneously. 2) Domain gap. Due to the lack of edited real scene text images, the netwo…
COMSATS University Islamabad（COMSATS大学伊斯兰堡分校）；Jashore University of Science and Technology（杰索尔科学技术大学）
Text detection in natural scene images for content analysis is an interesting task. The research community has seen some great developments for English/Mandarin text detection. However, Urdu text extraction in natural scene images is a task not well addressed. In this work, firstly, a new dataset is introduced for Urdu text in natural scene images. The dataset comprises of 500 standalone images acquired from real scenes. Secondly, the channel enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) method is applied to extract Urdu text regions as candidates in an image. Two-stage filtering mechanism …
North South University（北南大学）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉国工程技术大学）
The increasing popularity of animes makes it vulnerable to unwanted usages like copyright violations and pornography. That is why, we need to develop a method to detect and recognize animation characters. Skin detection is one of the most important steps in this way. Though there are some methods to detect human skin color, but those methods do not work properly for anime characters. Anime skin varies greatly from human skin in color, texture, tone and in different kinds of lighting. They also vary greatly among themselves. Moreover, many other things (for example leather, shirt, hair etc.), w…
Kyushu University（九州大学）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；The University of Electro-Communications（电气通信大学）
The character information in natural scene images contains various personal information, such as telephone numbers, home addresses, etc. It is a high risk of leakage the information if they are published. In this paper, we proposed a scene text erasing method to properly hide the information via an inpainting convolutional neural network (CNN) model. The input is a scene text image, and the output is expected to be text erased image with all the character regions filled up the colors of the surrounding background pixels. This work is accomplished by a CNN model through convolution to deconvolu…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Monash University（墨尔本大学）
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（路德维希·马克西米利安慕尼黑大学）
Training scene graph classification models requires a large amount of annotated image data. Meanwhile, scene graphs represent relational knowledge that can be modeled with symbolic data from texts or knowledge graphs. While image annotation demands extensive labor, collecting textual descriptions of natural scenes requires less effort. In this work, we investigate whether textual scene descriptions can substitute for annotated image data. To this end, we employ a scene graph classification framework that is trained not only from annotated images but also from symbolic data. In our architecture…
The requirement of large amounts of annotated images has become one grand challenge while training deep neural network models for various visual detection and recognition tasks. This paper presents a novel image synthesis technique that aims to generate a large amount of annotated scene text images for training accurate and robust scene text detection and recognition models. The proposed technique consists of three innovative designs. First, it realizes "semantic coherent" synthesis by embedding texts at semantically sensible regions within the background image, where the semantic coherence is…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
A critical challenge to image-text retrieval is how to learn accurate correspondences between images and texts. Most existing methods mainly focus on coarse-grained correspondences based on co-occurrences of semantic objects, while failing to distinguish the fine-grained local correspondences. In this paper, we propose a novel Scene Graph based Fusion Network (dubbed SGFN), which enhances the images'/texts' features through intra- and cross-modal fusion for image-text retrieval. To be specific, we design an intra-modal hierarchical attention fusion to incorporate semantic contexts, such as obj…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Localizing text instances in natural scenes is regarded as a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Nevertheless, owing to the extremely varied aspect ratios and scales of text instances in real scenes, most conventional text detectors suffer from the sub-text problem that only localizes the fragments of text instance (i.e., sub-texts). In this work, we quantitatively analyze the sub-text problem and present a simple yet effective design, COntrastive RElation (CORE) module, to mitigate that issue. CORE first leverages a vanilla relation block to model the relations among all text proposals …
Sorbonne University - University Pierre and Marie CURIE（索邦大学 - 皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；Image & Pervasive Access Lab（图像与普适访问实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；I2R（资讯通信研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Tencent Co. LTD（腾讯有限公司）；Institut Mines-Telecom（矿业电信学院）
Automatic reading texts in scenes has attracted increasing interest in recent years as texts often carry rich semantic information that is useful for scene understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel scene text proposal technique aiming for accurate reading texts in scenes. Inspired by the pooling layer in the deep neural network architecture, a pooling based scene text proposal technique is developed. A novel score function is designed which exploits the histogram of oriented gradients and is capable of ranking the proposals according to their probabilities of being text. An end-to-end s…
Automated recognition of texts in scenes has been a research challenge for years, largely due to the arbitrary variation of text appearances in perspective distortion, text line curvature, text styles and different types of imaging artifacts. The recent deep networks are capable of learning robust representations with respect to imaging artifacts and text style changes, but still face various problems while dealing with scene texts with perspective and curvature distortions. This paper presents an end-to-end trainable scene text recognition system (ESIR) that iteratively removes perspective di…
We present MAV3D (Make-A-Video3D), a method for generating three-dimensional dynamic scenes from text descriptions. Our approach uses a 4D dynamic Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), which is optimized for scene appearance, density, and motion consistency by querying a Text-to-Video (T2V) diffusion-based model. The dynamic video output generated from the provided text can be viewed from any camera location and angle, and can be composited into any 3D environment. MAV3D does not require any 3D or 4D data and the T2V model is trained only on Text-Image pairs and unlabeled videos. We demonstrate the ef…
IIT Jodhpur（印度理工学院焦特布尔分校）；University of Rouen（鲁昂大学）；Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）
Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia …
Synthetic data has been a critical tool for training scene text detection and recognition models. On the one hand, synthetic word images have proven to be a successful substitute for real images in training scene text recognizers. On the other hand, however, scene text detectors still heavily rely on a large amount of manually annotated real-world images, which are expensive. In this paper, we introduce UnrealText, an efficient image synthesis method that renders realistic images via a 3D graphics engine. 3D synthetic engine provides realistic appearance by rendering scene and text as a whole,…
Visual appearance is considered to be the most important cue to understand images for cross-modal retrieval, while sometimes the scene text appearing in images can provide valuable information to understand the visual semantics. Most of existing cross-modal retrieval approaches ignore the usage of scene text information and directly adding this information may lead to performance degradation in scene text free scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a full transformer architecture to unify these cross-modal retrieval scenarios in a single $\textbf{Vi}$sion and $\textbf{S}$cene $\textbf{T}…
We study the problem of extracting text instance contour information from images and use it to assist scene text detection. We propose a novel and effective framework for this and experimentally demonstrate that: (1) A CNN that can be effectively used to extract instance-level text contour from natural images. (2) The extracted contour information can be used for better scene text detection. We propose two ways for learning the contour task together with the scene text detection: (1) as an auxiliary task and (2) as multi-task cascade. Extensive experiments with different benchmark datasets dem…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Scene text detection is an important step of scene text recognition system and also a challenging problem. Different from general object detection, the main challenges of scene text detection lie on arbitrary orientations, small sizes, and significantly variant aspect ratios of text in natural images. In this paper, we present an end-to-end trainable fast scene text detector, named TextBoxes++, which detects arbitrary-oriented scene text with both high accuracy and efficiency in a single network forward pass. No post-processing other than an efficient non-maximum suppression is involved. We ha…
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…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Huawei Cloud & AI（华为云与人工智能）
Scene text retrieval aims to localize and search all text instances from an image gallery, which are the same or similar to a given query text. Such a task is usually realized by matching a query text to the recognized words, outputted by an end-to-end scene text spotter. In this paper, we address this problem by directly learning a cross-modal similarity between a query text and each text instance from natural images. Specifically, we establish an end-to-end trainable network, jointly optimizing the procedures of scene text detection and cross-modal similarity learning. In this way, scene tex…
Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to improve the resolution and visual quality of low-resolution (LR) scene text images, and consequently boost the performance of text recognition. However, most of existing STISR methods regard text images as natural scene images, ignoring the categorical information of text. In this paper, we make an inspiring attempt to embed categorical text prior into STISR model training. Specifically, we adopt the character probability sequence as the text prior, which can be obtained conveniently from a text recognition model. The text prior provides catego…
A crucial component for the scene text based reasoning required for TextVQA and TextCaps datasets involve detecting and recognizing text present in the images using an optical character recognition (OCR) system. The current systems are crippled by the unavailability of ground truth text annotations for these datasets as well as lack of scene text detection and recognition datasets on real images disallowing the progress in the field of OCR and evaluation of scene text based reasoning in isolation from OCR systems. In this work, we propose TextOCR, an arbitrary-shaped scene text detection and r…
An end-to-end trainable (fully differentiable) method for multi-language scene text localization and recognition is proposed. The approach is based on a single fully convolutional network (FCN) with shared layers for both tasks. E2E-MLT is the first published multi-language OCR for scene text. While trained in multi-language setup, E2E-MLT demonstrates competitive performance when compared to other methods trained for English scene text alone. The experiments show that obtaining accurate multi-language multi-script annotations is a challenging problem.
