Find More Accurate Text Boundary for Scene Text Detection

Runqiu Pan, Zezhou Li, Anna Zhu

Abstract: Arbitrary shape text detection is still an open problem due to several challenges, e.g., dense text adhesion, various sizes, and noises. In this work, we propose a novel scene text detection network by extracting and connecting a set of points on the boundary of each text instance. Our method mainly consists of three branches, including text center line (TCL) prediction, text orientation (TO) prediction, and text boundary offset (TBO) prediction to get the text boundary point proposals. Utilize these proposals, and the final refinement results can be obtained by point sampling and graph attention network(GAT). The detector can overcome the text instance sticking problem with these text boundary representations. Additionally, we propose distance-based dice loss and instance-aware L <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</inf> loss to remove false positives and get over various text sizes on text boundary offset prediction respectively. In this way, our method can directly and efficiently generate accurate text boundaries without any post-processing. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets show the effectiveness of our design and training strategy, which also demonstrates our method’s state-of-the-art performance for arbitrary shape text detection.