A Straightforward and Efficient Instance-Aware Curved Text Detector

A challenging aspect of scene text detection is to handle curved texts. In order to avoid the tedious manual annotations for training curve text detector, and to overcome the limitation of regression-based text detectors to irregular text, we introduce straightforward and efficient instance-aware curved scene text detector, namely, look more than twice (LOMT), which makes the regression-based text detection results gradually change from loosely bounded box to compact polygon. LOMT mainly composes of curve text shape approximation module and component merging network. The shape approximation module uses a particle swarm optimization-based text shape approximation method (called PSO-TSA) to fine-tune the quadrilateral text detection results to fit the curved text. The component merging network merges incomplete text sub-parts of text instances into more complete polygon through instance awareness, called ICMN. Experiments on five text datasets demonstrate that our method not only achieves excellent performance but also has relatively high speed. Ablation experiments show that PSO-TSA can solve the text’s shape optimization problem efficiently, and ICMN has a satisfactory merger effect.