| Literature Reviews CSC499 |
In this paper we introduce a new method for text detec- tion in natural images. The method comprises two contribu- tions: First, a fast and scalable engine to generate synthetic images of text in clutter. This engine overlays synthetic text to existing background images in a natural way, account- ing for the local 3D scene geometry. Second, we use the synthetic images to train a Fully-Convolutional Regression Network (FCRN) which efficiently performs text detection and bounding-box regression at all locations and multiple scales in an image. We discuss the relation of FCRN to the recently-introduced YOLO detector, as well as other end-to- end object detection systems based on deep learning. The resulting detection network significantly out performs cur- rent methods for text detection in natural images, achiev- ing an F-measure of 84.2% on the standard ICDAR 2013 benchmark. Furthermore, it can process 15 images per sec- ond on a GPU.
In this work we present an end-to-end system for text spotting—localising and recognising text in natural scene images—and text based image retrieval. This system is based on a region proposal mechanism for detection and deep convolutional neural networks for recognition. Our pipeline uses a novel combination of complementary proposal generation techniques to ensure high recall, and a fast subsequent filtering stage for improving precision. For the recognition and ranking of proposals, we train very large convolutional neural networks to perform word recognition on the whole proposal region at the same time, departing from the character classifier based systems of the past. These networks are trained solely on data produced by a synthetic text generation engine, requiring no human labelled data. Analysing the stages of our pipeline, we show state-of-the-art performance throughout.We perform rigorous experiments across a number of standard end-to-end text spotting benchmarks and text-based image retrieval datasets, showing a large improvement over all previous methods. Finally, we demonstrate a real-world application of our text spotting system to allow thousands of hours of news footage to be instantly searchable via a text query