SA-Text: Simple but Accurate Detector for Text of Arbitrary Shapes.
Qitong Wang, Yi Zheng, Margrit Betke · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2019
We introduce a new framework for text named SA-Text meaning Simple but Accurate, which utilizes heatmaps to detect text regions in natural scene images effectively. SA-Text detects text that occurs in various fonts, shapes, and orientations in natural scene images with complicated backgrounds. Experiments on three challenging and public scene-text-detection datasets, Total-Text, SCUT-CTW1500, and MSRA-TD500 show the effectiveness and generalization ability of SA-Text in detecting not only multi-lingual oriented straight but also curved text in scripts of multiple languages. To further show the practicality of SA-Text, we combine it with a powerful state-of-the-art text recognition model and thus propose a pipeline-based text system called SAA (text spotting is used as the technical term for detection and recognition of text). Our experimental results of SAA on the Total-Text dataset show that SAA outperforms four state-of-the-art text frameworks by at least 9 percent points in the F-measure, which means that SA-Text can be used as a complete text and recognition system in real applications.