Line Segment Detection Using Transformers without Edges

In this paper, we present a holistically end-to-end algorithm for line segment detection with transformers that is post-processing and heuristics-guided intermediate processing (edge/junction/region detection) free. Our method, named LinE segment TRansformers (LETR), tackles the three main problems in this domain, namely edge element detection, perceptual grouping, and holistic inference by three highlights in detection transformers (DETR) including tokenized queries with integrated encoding and decoding, self-attention, and joint queries respectively. The transformers learn to progressively refine line segments through layers of self-attention mechanism skipping the heuristic design in the previous line segmentation algorithms. We equip multi-scale encoder/decoder in the transformers to perform fine-grained line segment detection under a direct end-point distance loss that is particularly suitable for entities such as line segments that are not conveniently represented by bounding boxes. In the experiments, we show state-of-the-art results on Wireframe and YorkUrban benchmarks. LETR points to a promising direction for joint end-to-end detection of general entities beyond the standard object bounding box representation.