Geometry-Aware Scene Text Detection With Instance Transformation Network

Fangfang Wang, Liming Zhao, Xi Li, Xinchao Wang, Dacheng Tao; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 1381-1389

Localizing text in the wild is challenging in the situations of complicated geometric layout of the targets like random orientation and large aspect ratio. In this paper, we propose a geometry-aware modeling approach tailored for scene text representation with an end-to-end learning scheme. In our approach, a novel Instance Transformation Network (ITN) is presented to learn the geometry-aware representation encoding the unique geometric configurations of scene text instances with in-network transformation embedding, resulting in a robust and elegant framework to detect words or text lines at one pass. An end-to-end multi-task learning strategy with transformation regression, text/non-text classification and coordinate regression is adopted in the ITN. Experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in detecting scene text in various geometric configurations.