Pattern recognition (psychology)

Artificial intelligence

Natural language processing

Spotting

Computer science

Speech recognition

Computer vision

End-to-end principle

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Scene text detection and recognition have been well explored in the past few years. Despite the progress, efficient and accurate end-to-end spotting of arbitrarily-shaped text remains challenging. In this work, we propose an end-to-end text spotting framework, termed PAN++, which can efficiently detect and recognize text of arbitrary shapes in natural scenes. PAN++ is based on the kernel representation that reformulates a text line as a text kernel (central region) surrounded by peripheral pixels. By systematically comparing with existing scene text representations, we show that our kernel representation can not only describe arbitrarily-shaped text but also well distinguish adjacent text. Moreover, as a pixel-based representation, the kernel representation can be predicted by a single fully convolutional network, which is very friendly to real-time applications. Taking the advantages of the kernel representation, we design a series of components as follows: 1) a computationally efficient feature enhancement network composed of stacked Feature Pyramid Enhancement Modules (FPEMs); 2) a lightweight detection head cooperating with Pixel Aggregation (PA); and 3) an efficient attention-based recognition head with Masked RoI. Benefiting from the above designs, our method achieves high inference speed while maintaining competitive accuracy. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method.

PAN++: Towards Efficient and Accurate End-to-End Spotting of Arbitrarily-Shaped Text