Location-Aware Feature Selection Text Detection Network

Regression-based text detection methods have already achieved promising performances with simple network structure and high efficiency. However, they are behind in accuracy comparing with recent segmentation-based text detectors. In this work, we discover that one important reason to this case is that regression-based methods usually utilize a fixed feature selection way, i.e. selecting features in a single location or in neighbor regions, to predict components of the bounding box, such as the distances to the boundaries or the rotation angle. The features selected through this way sometimes are not the best choices for predicting every component of a text bounding box and thus degrade the accuracy performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Location-Aware feature Selection text detection Network (LASNet). LASNet selects suitable features from different locations to separately predict the five components of a bounding box and gets the final bounding box through the combination of these components. Specifically, instead of using the classification score map to select one feature for predicting the whole bounding box as most of the existing methods did, the proposed LASNet first learn five new confidence score maps to indicate the prediction accuracy of the bounding box components, respectively. Then, a Location-Aware Feature Selection mechanism (LAFS) is designed to weightily fuse the top-$K$ prediction results for each component according to their confidence score, and to combine the all five fused components into a final bounding box. As a result, LASNet predicts the more accurate bounding boxes by using a learnable feature selection way. The experimental results demonstrate that our LASNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with single-model and single-scale testing, outperforming all existing regression-based detectors.