Efficient and Accurate Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection with Pixel Aggregation Network

Scene text detection, an important step of scene text reading systems, has witnessed rapid development with convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, two main challenges still exist and hamper its deployment to real-world applications. The first problem is the trade-off between speed and accuracy. The second one is to model the arbitrary-shaped text instance. Recently, some methods have been proposed to tackle arbitrary-shaped text detection, but they rarely take the speed of the entire pipeline into consideration, which may fall short in practical applications.In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate arbitrary-shaped text detector, termed Pixel Aggregation Network (PAN), which is equipped with a low computational-cost segmentation head and a learnable post-processing. More specifically, the segmentation head is made up of Feature Pyramid Enhancement Module (FPEM) and Feature Fusion Module (FFM). FPEM is a cascadable U-shaped module, which can introduce multi-level information to guide the better segmentation. FFM can gather the features given by the FPEMs of different depths into a final feature for segmentation. The learnable post-processing is implemented by Pixel Aggregation (PA), which can precisely aggregate text pixels by predicted similarity vectors. Experiments on several standard benchmarks validate the superiority of the proposed PAN. It is worth noting that our method can achieve a competitive F-measure of 79.9% at 84.2 FPS on CTW1500.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Scene Text Detection ICDAR 2015 TextSnake F-Measure 82.6 # 34
Precision 84.9 # 34
Recall 80.4 # 29
Scene Text Detection MSRA-TD500 PAN Recall 83.8 # 2
F-Measure 84.1 # 9
Scene Text Detection SCUT-CTW1500 PAN-640 F-Measure 83.7 # 8
Precision 86.4 # 8
Recall 81.2 # 8
Scene Text Detection Total-Text PAN-640 F-Measure 85% # 13
Precision 89.3 # 9
Recall 81 # 14

Methods