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Scene text detection with fully convolutional neural networks

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Abstract

Text detection in scene image has become a hot topic in computer vision and artificial intelligence research, due to its wide range of applications and challenges. Most state-of-the-art methods for text detection based on deep learning rely on text bounding box regression. These methods can not well handle the case that if the scene text is curved. In this paper, we propose a new framework for arbitrarily oriented text detection in natural images based on fully convolutional neural networks. The main idea is to represent a text instance by two forms: text center block and word stroke region. These two elements are detected by two fully convolutional networks, respectively. Final detections are produced by the word region surrounding box algorithm. The proposed method does not need to regress the extant bounding box of the text instance, mainly because the predicted text block region itself implicitly contains position and orientation information. Besides, our method can well handle text in different languages, arbitrary orientations, curved shape and various fonts. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we perform experiments on three public datasets: MSRA-TD500, USTB-SV1K and ICDAR2013, and compare it with other state-of-the-art methods. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive results. Based on VGG-16, our method achieves an F-measure of 78.84% on MSRA-TD500, 59.34% on USTB-SV1K, and 88.21% on ICDAR2013.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part to Zhandong Liu by Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 61662082 and No. U1703261, and in part to Dr. Wengang Zhou by Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 61632019, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program By CAST (No. 2016QNRC001), and in part to Dr. Houqiang Li by Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 61836011 and No. 61390514.

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  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System, Department of Electronic Engineering and Information Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China

    Zhandong Liu, Wengang Zhou & Houqiang Li

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  1. Zhandong Liu
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  2. Wengang Zhou
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  3. Houqiang Li
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Correspondence to Houqiang Li.

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Liu, Z., Zhou, W. & Li, H. Scene text detection with fully convolutional neural networks. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 18205–18227 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7177-4

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