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Scene Text Detection with Box Supervision and Level Set Evolution

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Pattern Recognition (ACPR 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14406))

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Abstract

For arbitrarily-shaped scene text detection, most existing methods require expensive polygon-level annotations for supervised training. In order to reduce the cost in data annotation, we propose a novel bounding box supervised scene text detection method, which needs training images only labeled in rectangular boxes. The detection model integrates the classical level set model with deep neural network. It consists a backbone network, a text proposal network, and a text segmentation network. For weakly-supervised training of the segmentation network using box supervision, the proposed method iteratively learns a series of level sets through a Chan-Vese energy based loss function. The segmentation network is trained by minimizing the fully differentiable level set energy function wherein the text instance boundary is iteratively updated. Further, both the input image and its deep features are employed in the level set energy function to improve the convergence. The proposed method can be trained in weakly-supervised or mixed-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks (ICDAR2015, C-SVT, CTW1500, Total-Text, and ICDAR-ArT) show that our mixed-supervised model can achieve competitive detection performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program under Grant 2020AAA0108003 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61721004.

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Correspondence to Cheng-Lin Liu .

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Zhao, M., Yin, F., Liu, CL. (2023). Scene Text Detection with Box Supervision and Level Set Evolution. In: Lu, H., Blumenstein, M., Cho, SB., Liu, CL., Yagi, Y., Kamiya, T. (eds) Pattern Recognition. ACPR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14406. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47634-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47634-1_14

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