An Accurate Segmentation-Based Scene Text Detector With Context Attention and Repulsive Text Border

Xi Liu, Gaojing Zhou, Rui Zhang, Xiaolin Wei; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2020, pp. 550-551

Scene text detection is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision and has attr!acted great interest. In general, scene text detection methods are divided into two categories: detection-based and segmentation-based methods. Recently, the segmentation-based methods are more and more popular due to their superior performances and the advantages of detecting arbitrary-shape texts. However, there still exist the following problems: (a) the misclassification of the unexpected texts, (b) the split of long text lines, (c) the failure of separating very close text instances. In this paper, we propose an accurate segmentation-based detector, which is equipped with context attention and repulsive text border. The context attention incorporates global channel attention, non-local self-attention and spatial attention to better exploit the global and local context, which can greatly increase the discriminative ability for pixels. Due to the enhancement of pixel-level features, false positives and the misdetections of long texts are reduced. Besides, for the purpose of solving very close text instance, a repulsive pixel link, which focuses on the relationships between pixels at the border, is proposed. Experiments on several standard benchmarks, including MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2015, ICDAR2017-MLT and CTW1500, validate the superiority of the proposed method.