A Direct Regression Scene Text Detector With Position-Sensitive Segmentation

Direct regression methods have demonstrated their success on various multi-oriented benchmarks for scene text detection due to the high recall rate for small targets and the direct regression for text boxes. However, too many false positive candidates and inaccurate position regression still limit the performance of these methods. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end method by introducing position-sensitive segmentation into the direct regression method to overcome these shortcomings. We generate the ground truth of position-sensitive segmentation maps based on the information of text boxes so that the position-sensitive segmentation module can be trained synchronously with the direct regression module. Besides, more information about the relative position of text is provided for the network through the training of position-sensitive segmentation maps, which improves the expressiveness of the network. We also introduce spatial pyramid of position-sensitive segmentation into the proposed method considering the huge differences in sizes and aspect ratios of scene texts and we propose position-sensitive COI(Corner area of Interest) pooling into the proposed method to speed up the inference. Experiments on datasets ICDAR2015, MLT-17 and COCO-Text demonstrate that the proposed method has a comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods while it is more efficient. We also provide abundant ablation experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of these improvements in our proposed method.