Detecting Multi-Oriented Text with Corner-based Region Proposals

Previous approaches for scene text detection usually rely on manually defined sliding windows. In this paper, an intuitive region-based method is presented to detect multi-oriented text without any prior knowledge regarding the textual shape. We first introduce a Corner-based Region Proposal Network (CRPN) that employs corners to estimate the possible locations of text instances instead of shifting a set of default anchors. The proposals generated by CRPN are geometry adaptive, which makes our method robust to various text aspect ratios and orientations. Moreover, we design a simple embedded data augmentation module inside the region-wise subnetwork, which not only ensures the model utilizes training data more efficiently, but also learns to find the most representative instance of the input images for training. Experimental results on public benchmarks confirm that the proposed method is capable of achieving comparable performance with the state-of-the-art methods. On the ICDAR 2013 and 2015 datasets, it obtains F-measure of 0.876 and 0.845 respectively. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/xhzdeng/crpn