Text detection in natural images is a challenging but necessary task for many applications. Existing approaches utilize large deep convolutional neural networks making it difficult to use them in real-world tasks. We propose a small yet relatively precise text extraction method. The basic component of it is a convolutional neural network which works in a fully-convolutional manner and produces results at multiple scales. Each scale output predicts whether a pixel is a part of some word, its geometry, and its relation to neighbors at the same scale and between scales. The key factor of reducing the complexity of the model was the utilization of depthwise separable convolution, linear bottlenecks, and inverted residuals. Experiments on public datasets show that the proposed network can effectively detect text while keeping the number of parameters in the range of 1.58 to 10.59 million in different configurations.
Since the implementation of deep learning became practical, text detection techniques are based on neural networks. A deep learning based method @cite_2 uses fully convolutional network (FCN) to find a probability that pixels belong to a text area. After applying maximally stable extremal regions (MSER), a shortened FCN was utilized to acquire the character centroids and with the help of intensity and geometric criteria remove false candidates.
@cite_2
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In this paper, we propose a novel approach for text detection in natural images. Both local and global cues are taken into account for localizing text lines in a coarse-to-fine procedure. First, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) model is trained to predict the salient map of text regions in a holistic manner. Then, text line hypotheses are estimated by combining the salient map and character components. Finally, another FCN classifier is used to predict the centroid of each character, in order to remove the false hypotheses. The framework is general for handling text in multiple orientations, languages and fonts. The proposed method consistently achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three text detection benchmarks: MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015 and ICDAR2013. Scene text detection has attracted great attention these years. Text potentially exist in a wide variety of images or videos and play an important role in understanding the scene. In this paper, we present a novel text detection algorithm which is composed of two cascaded steps: (1) a multi-scale fully convolutional neural network (FCN) is proposed to extract text block regions, (2) a novel instance (word or line) aware segmentation is designed to further remove false positives and obtain word instances. The proposed algorithm can accurately localize word or text line in arbitrary orientations, including curved text lines which cannot be handled in a lot of other frameworks. Our algorithm achieved state-of-the-art performance in ICDAR 2013 (IC13), ICDAR 2015 (IC15) and CUTE80 and Street View Text (SVT) benchmark datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for text detec- tion in natural images. Both local and global cues are taken into account for localizing text lines in a coarse-to-fine pro- cedure. First, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) model is trained to predict the salient map of text regions in a holistic manner. Then, text line hypotheses are estimated by combining the salient map and character components. Fi- nally, another FCN classifier is used to predict the centroid of each character, in order to remove the false hypotheses. The framework is general for handling text in multiple ori- entations, languages and fonts. The proposed method con- sistently achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three text detection benchmarks: MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015 and ICDAR2013. Fully convolutional neural network (FCN) has been dominating the game of face detection task for a few years with its congenital capability of sliding-window-searching with shared kernels, which boiled down all the redundant calculation, and most recent state-of-the-art methods such as Faster-RCNN, SSD, YOLO and FPN use FCN as their backbone. So here comes one question: Can we find a universal strategy to further accelerate FCN with higher accuracy, so could accelerate all the recent FCN-based methods? To analyze this, we decompose the face searching space into two orthogonal directions, scale' and spatial'. Only a few coordinates in the space expanded by the two base vectors indicate foreground. So if FCN could ignore most of the other points, the searching space and false alarm should be significantly boiled down. Based on this philosophy, a novel method named scale estimation and spatial attention proposal ( @math ) is proposed to pay attention to some specific scales and valid locations in the image pyramid. Furthermore, we adopt a masked-convolution operation based on the attention result to accelerate FCN calculation. Experiments show that FCN-based method RPN can be accelerated by about @math with the help of @math and masked-FCN and at the same time it can also achieve the state-of-the-art on FDDB, AFW and MALF face detection benchmarks as well.